Beginning with his academic training in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, for a long time, Daniel Chen painted figurative images of grain fields under the highly saturated golden sun of his native Alabama; his mother's kitchen that gave him a sense of warmth and belonging; and the gaze directed to his own body as an Asian male. He speaks of those early paintings as a healing process through his personal life — a song that commemorates the sentiments as a child of a first-generation immigrant family.
Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present Daniel Chen's first solo exhibition “Flowers in the Mirror”, which takes its title from the Qing-Dynasty supernatural-fantasy (Mohuan Zhiguai) novel, in which the main protagonists travel by boat tofantasized lands, including the Women’s Kingdom (Nv’er Guo) with tales of women making their way in the imperial court. The novel celebrates the talents of female figures and challenges the constraints of gender traditions of the time. Adapting the same title for his debut exhibition, Chen intends to challenge the history of abstraction as a Chinese American painter. Here, the imagery of flowers serves as an essential thread that blooms through his creative landscape. For the artist, flowers symbolize love, beauty and time: offering and gifting flowers can be an expression of love — "Blame it on the wind and rain of last night, that countless flowers dropped off to the ground.” 1 — the scattering petals reflect the sorrow for the time passing, as well as countless moments of heartbreak and solitude. Each stroke of the painted petals is a trace of his presence — a language of love.
Chen's painting language harks back to expressionism; he piles, deconstructs or builds up layers of paint on the canvas, and then reorganizes them into new compositions and forms. For the artist, these buried layers embody the traces of time as he treats oil paint almost like sculptural materials, repeatedly stacking, trimming and reapplying it. There is childlike joy in his touch, akin to a kid playing with Lego blocks, giving his imagination a playground to use specific color combinations and modules to assemble different compositions. In Chen's case, the building blocks are colors; one must grasp the rules of this painterly game in order to create a unique image of one’s own. The proportion of each composition is guided by a precise draft made beforehand, and the final image is assembled to form a manifold landscape of the subconscious mind. In Cross Bridge (2022), for example, the artist incorporates an aerial view of the city streets with bright neon lights into the form of an open book with precise structural proportions and his unique formula of colors. After his first trip to Mount Huangshan in his familial hometown Anhui from the United States, where he grew up, he immediately realized the emotions, rhythms and aura in Chinese landscape paintings. He then recalled his first encounter with the dotted brushstrokes of Georges Seurat, an all-time admired painter of Chen’s. In Untitled (Huangshan) (2020), Chen decides to use his formal training in painting to visualize the landscape that is preserved in his heart.
“Flowers in the Mirror” is the artist's first solo exhibition in his familial homeland China. Upon learning about Chen’s story, looking at his works, you are reminded that a genuine work of art comes from an earnest confrontation with oneself and from the courage to embrace solitude. Looking deep into the past and present that make up who you are empowers you to welcome the future with honesty. Each petal grown under the artist’s brush is a testament to the existence of love. Whether you are a believer or not, the language of love is written there.
Text by Cheng Min
December 31, 2022
