On the Brink of Love and Pain | Review of Daniel Chen’s solo exhibition “Time to Say Goodbye”

Wong Tone, June 24, 2025
In the pristine white gallery space of Capsule, Daniel Chen's canvases resemble fresh, moist soil. The paint fragments—built up through repeated scraping and layering—are thick and lush like ripe, fallen fruit, embedded in the earth. There is a sense of pleasure that permeates these visual elements of materiality, loosening the viewer's vision and imagination. This is not a pursuit of form, but rather a commemorative celebration of the ineffable, pivotal moments in the life of this Chinese-American artist born in Alabama in 1997. The exhibition title, Time to Say Goodbye, is taken from a song written by Lucio Quarantotto, a favorite of the artist’s late father. It is Daniel’s tribute to his father, and with the lyric “Con te partirò” (“I will go with you”), he solemnly bids farewell.
 
Daniel Chen's creative process is intuitive rather than designed. He wants his works to possess “a richness of color, richness of life, richness of emotion—richness in everything.” his exuberant need for expression finds its outlet in his layered paintings, through which creative impulses, secret hopes, and even his parents’ loneliness and trauma are released. Daniel's father, a professor who journeyed from China's Huangshan to Huntsville, Alabama, epitomizes a generation forced to survive and assimilate. In U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (2024), paint fragments are arranged in gridded pattern in vague reminiscence of the American flag–not as a national symbol, but as an critique of identity-screening mechanisms. For three decades, his parents, out of love for their homeland, retained their Chinese citizenship and refrained from naturalizing in the U.S. However, restricted by China’s household registration (hukou) system, they became “census ghosts,” caught between two bureaucratic systems. Their story echoes a collective trauma shared by generations of immigrants: in their “new hometown” (not New York or Xinxiang, China, but an in-between place), their space for growth was standardized and fragmented, while their homeland denied them the blessing of being rooted. Like the floating yet fixed paint fragments, theirs is a nostalgia that cannot settle, a belonging that cannot anchor.
 
When an abstract painter makes figurative works, there is an almost transgressive sense of intimacy. The portrait of the artist’s father Chen Zhijian (2024), welcoming viewers at the gallery entrance, embodies this tension. This rare portrait, serving as the exhibition's "emotional starting point," features a face illuminated in green as if reflected by the greeneries of the gallery’s garden. For Daniel, "abstract or figurative… they're all just paint."  The dense solitude and confusion do not fade when the works veer into abstraction. Instead, they spill over and seep into every subsequent work in their brushstrokes, color relationship, and structural tension, concealing a profound sympathy and love for his father. Painting becomes an act of remembrance, making the fleeting eternal. This work embodies that primal function of painting: allowing the history of his father to transcend time.
 
If immigrant background granted Chen’s practice its deep roots, the richness of his artistic language stems from cross-cultural visual nourishment and subconscious consumption of the digital age. He acknowledges the inspiration (on materiality) he draws from Abstract Expressionism—the struggle in Grace Hartigan’s brushwork, the permeability of Helen Frankenthaler’s colors, the historical strata of Anselm Kiefer’s canvases. For instance, Grass Knots (2025) pays homage to Georges Seurat’s best-known painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte with its border of colored dots. Like a laborer, he scrapes and piles on paint, each thick stroke becoming an intuitive gesture. His lived experiences amid urban and digital jungles infuse his work with a contemporary spirit—from dazzling billboards to online “how to paint” tutorials. Ultimately, what drives him to fuse expression, perception, and life is the most primal urge of all: the joy of playing with paint.
 
“There was a time when I worried that a painting might be too light, like a balloon drifting off the wall.” He wants a painting to have enough volume to occupy wall space, yet also to feel airy. His use of diptychs is an attempt to create paintings that can breathe. In Twin Tornados (2025), for example, the left panel is abstract, inlaid with his signature paint fragments to channel personal emotion and sensibility, while the right panel features clear, Pop-ish figurative contours—imagery filtered through modern media. This juxtaposition creates an opening for a temporal dialogue: the past does not disappear linearly but is constantly reactivated, interpreted, and reshaped by the present. In real life, time is fleeting, whereas in painting, it is infinite. In a way, these works are a fusion of past, present, and future—“One’s past dreams can lead toward the future.”
 
Time to Say Goodbye is an artist’s tender farewell to a beloved parent. More subtly, it is also Daniel Chen’s farewell to the illusion of fixed identity and singular cultural belonging. The acts of scraping, gathering, and piecing together in his game of paint mirror the psychological processes of detaching from established perceptions, preserving memories, and forging new identities. As the lyric “Con te… Con te…” implies, ultimately farewell is not separation, but connection reforged stronger. In this way, past experiences and emotions are reunited on the canvas. They are no longer adrift but radiant with warmth, occupying the liminal space of our generation's love and pain.