Daniel Chen was born in 1997 in Huntsville, Alabama, and currently works in Shanghai, China. Chen received his B.F.A. in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design with the Florence Lief Award. An earnest documentation of a lived live underpins his practice, and exploits abstraction to divert expectations away from the familiar still-life painting. The intuitive process of painting is built up through individual strokes carrying demarcations of time that oppose the expectation of joy the paintings initially bring from the playful appearance of vibrant colors and combination of painterly languages. The paint is simple functioning as paint – paint as paint, paint as object, paint as communicative, or paint as emotive.