Daniel Chen: Time to Say Goodbye: Shanghai

Capsule is pleased to present artist Daniel Chen's (b. 1997, Huntsville, Alabama) second solo exhibition Time to Say Goodbye, on view from April 26 to June 28, 2025. The exhibition features paintings made between 2023 and 2025, during which the artist underwent a profound personal loss-the passing of his father. Painting became a way for him to record and process emotions, and a gift to his father and the audience.

Materiality is at the heart of Chen's practice. Born in the 1990s in the U.S. and trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Chen's artistic exploration has been shaped by the practices of abstract artists active in New York in the 1980s-such as Jonathan Lasker, Joan Snyder, David Salle, Stephen Mueller, and Bill Jensen, who, in an attempt to break away from the austerity of minimalism and conceptualism, began rethinking how to introduce rich brushwork into space and imbue the process of painting with metaphors and physicality. Many of them remain relevant in the teaching of American art schools today, having developed a painterly vocabulary that continues to influence later generations of artists-one that highlights concepts such as figure/ground relationships, gesture, and the incorporation of figuration or landscape within abstraction.

 

Daniel Chen extends this lineage. He often uses a palette knife to ensure each stroke differs from the next. His canvas is dominated by organic forms and brims with a vibrant array of colors and gestures. Particularly noteworthy, however, is how he introduces the element of time into the use of materials. In Thorns, a painting that was started in 2020, the rugged texture evokes the weathered surface of the earth. The painting underwent four major transformations-each as radical as a tectonic shift. Throughout the process, paint that was scraped away was collected, left to harden over time, and then reused-arranged into stars, petals, blankets, or moss on the canvas.

In Wedding Party and Twin Tornados, accumulated fragments of paint are inlaid on the canvas like gemstones. Each one is unique, each a visible decision, almost overwhelming in their exuberance. One can spend time perusing debris of pigment, studying them like a naturalist might study fossils-uncovering their form, habitat and cycle of life. There seems to be a pressing yet generous desire to share in this approach. What unfolds in front of us here is time. Compressed. Flattened.

 

Both works take the form of diptychs, suggesting two parallel perspectives within the same temporal frame. In the late 20th century, the diptych experienced a resurgence as a device to explore narrative development, contrast and contradiction. In Wedding Party, a grid-based composition flows from the left to the right panel, creating continuity while marking a clear division. In Twin Tornados, one panel is bestrewn with abstract clouds of paint, while the other is a Pop rendition of a vernacular photograph. The stark contrast between the two panels opens up a dialogue that transcends time and space. The composition evokes Cy Twombly's and David Salle's experiment with the diptych in the 1990s. Chen once wrote, "I'm still trying to figure out why I'm drawn to diptychs. Maybe it's because two paintings or ideas placed side by side, interacting and even conflicting with one another, generate a special kind of meaning that allows me to connect with them more earnestly."

This emotional resonance sparkled by juxtaposition extends to his single-panel works. Chen Zhijian, a portrait of the artist's father, stands apart from the other works in the exhibition in its figurative representation. Though formally distinct from the abstract paintings layered with time and fragments, the portrait acts as an emotional anchor, contextualizing the colors and brushstrokes in autobiographical memory. Chen regards this portrait as, in a way, the origin of all the works. "The green skin," he says, "implies him standing in nature, but also suggests a sense of alienation-of being estranged from the land." In this sense, emotion-rather than form-becomes the thread tying the works together.

 

This feeling of estrangement reverberates throughout the exhibition. The title Time to Say Goodbye is the name of Chen's father's favorite song (performed by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman); it is also a message for the artist himself in the wake of his father's passing. As a second-generation immigrant born in the United States, Chen's personal emotional experiences are deeply intertwined with a broader diasporic identity. Through the resonance with his father's life experience, he seeks to understand and respond to the identity.

 

The work U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, composed of a dyed background and clotted pigment, continues this emotional echo. In his notes, Chen writes: "This is a flag that does not wish to symbolize, but instead commemorates lived experience. I thought of my dad moving to the States, trying to fit in, learning English, becoming a citizen-and all he had to go through to get there. The accumulated paint fragments on the canvas reflect that journey. They were scraped off, discarded, and repurposed. Yet in the end they found their place, forming this gridded composition."

 

Amid the constant accumulating, recompositing, and repositioning of the fragments, painting itself seems to have performed a ritual of farewell. American scholar Lewis Hyde, in his 1983 publication The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, argued that genuine art functions as a gift, passed along in a system different from the market economy. It is through the gesture of gifting-of artists offering memories, stories, and feelings to the viewers-that the personal and the public realms are bridged. This vision of art as gift resonates with Chen's approach to painting.

 

Fireworks of Flowers is the artist's bouquet to his father. Here, memory and sentiment are translated into visual form as a way to reconcile with death. Perhaps that's why the painting overflows with exuberance-all colors in full bloom, every mark preserved. Seemingly nothing has been held back or left out. One can imagine Chen working in the studio like a pâtissier or construction worker. Physical labor becomes a way to digest life. His paint absorbs memories and stories, and spits them out as grids, flowers, portraits, and clusters. Colors, figures, and feelings are mixed together and splashed out.

 

In the end, this is a silent gift-for dad, or one that stays here, waiting to be seen.

 

Text by Xiaofu Wang