KAREN JIANG

Hexachordal Space series
2023-2025

The mind’s desire to comprehend begins at a single point. Within this series, I broke apart the elements of drawing to understand, engage, and investigate the spatial existence of nature within perspective lines: the suggestion of occupied space is rendered through the linearity of the space in which it inhabits. Here, then, exists a relational state between every element on the canvas—a shifting continuity between being and non-being. It is a suggestion that extends beyond our current field of vision.

Category
Painting

Hexachordal Space (G)
pigment and pencil on canvas
75 x 120 cm, 2023

Hexachordal Space (E-B)
pigment and pencil on calico
75 x 120 cm, 2024

Hexachordal Space (imperfection)
graphite on calico
75 x 120 cm, 2024

Hexachordal Space (E-C)
pigment and pencil on calico
80 x 130 cm, 2024

Hexachordal Space (parallel)
acrylic and pencil on calico
60 x 75 cm, 2025

Separating Water from Water series
2024-2025

In a broader sense, nothing that exists in one moment continues to exist in the next. Could the present moment perhaps be thought of as a constant variable, that is everything and nothing all at once? Positive spatial compositions, here, disperse and form bonds observed in the polarity of water molecules.

Category
Painting

Separating Water from Water (osmosis)
pigment and pencil on canvas
24 x 30 cm, 2024

Separating Water from Water (gathered to one place)
pigment and pencil on calico
18 x 24 cm, 2024

Neither dense nor series
2024-2025

A cool summer air breathes through the plants, lifting each leaf, and creating a low rustling vibration. The gradual rise of the visual density of wind in contrast to and subsequently its eventual dissipation into the foreground and background examines an element that is neither solid nor elusive, dense nor…

Category
Painting

Neither dense nor
pigment on calico
18 x 24 cm, 2024

Neither dense nor (there was morning)
pigment and acrylic on calico
20 x 25 cm, 2024

Neither dense nor (to give light)
pigment and acrylic on calico
18 x 24 cm, 2024

Fluidity series
2024-2025

All matter is relational. This is a study of line and linearity through time and spatial occupancy. In this reduction, line is form and form is line.

Category
Painting

Fluidity (transience)
pigment and pencil on linen
18 x 24 cm, 2024

Fluidity (streams came up from the earth)
pigment and pencil on canvas
150 x 100 cm, 2025

Text

How can we approach viewing and thinking about things we do not understand? In my practice, I delve into a timescale beyond the human. I am interested in the elements that have existed before and will continue to exist after human existence. In my paintings, the line becomes the unification and periphery of two opposing forces, inside which more lines—first literally, then metaphorically—divide and unify the space repeatedly towards a suggestion of the infinite.

Mark making emerging in the canvas vibrate in the space constructed by vertical lines. This vibration has a rhythmic quality that differs: when marks are made by an additive placement of pigment on canvas, forms are suggested through implied positions (the dimension of the rock is sculpted by the perspective lines upon which it sits); when marks are made through a subtractive process of pigment on canvas, fluid forms resound to the surface of the canvas like shafts of sunlight. The subtle shifts that occur across forms created through this additive and subtractive process attempts to examine “[a] time of living with a ‘minus’ way of thinking along with our ‘plus’… by simultaneously considering to make something and to dissipate something” as described by Lee Ufan.

Each phenomenon within linear space is distinctive and irreproducible—highlighting the relative rather than the absolute. The paintings are between stillness and motion, whole and divided, painted and bare, but never either. Line and form are not arbitrarily placed, nor do they depict land or sea. The ubiquitous nature of this encounter is reflected in the seemingly monochromatic palette of each painting. This internal directionality of questioning opens a dimension where the possibility and impossibility of knowing and being outside of the human condition exists.