As Life As Season: Spring Flows, Autumn Gathers: Jenny Chen Solo Exhibition

Jenny Chen’s latest solo exhibition at Tina Keng Gallery, As Life As Season: Spring Flows, Autumn Gathers, marks her long-awaited return following 2022’s Order in Chaos. After a three-year hiatus, this new exhibition presents nearly 27 new works, encompassing two major series: acrylic paintings and collages. Notably, As Life As Season: Spring Flows, Autumn Gathers is also the inaugural exhibition in Tina Keng Gallery’s newly renovated space. In response to this fresh setting, Chen’s works adopt a more expansive rhythm and a brighter visual language, engaging directly with the transformed gallery environment.

According to the artist, after decades of living in New York, she returned to Taiwan abruptly during the pandemic due to a family health emergency. This unexpected life shift brought about a sense of disorientation, both emotionally and in adapting to a new environment. Having been immersed in New York’s rich and diverse cultural landscape for over 30 years, Chen had grown accustomed to its constant stimulation. Back in Taiwan, the quieter pace of life and the emotional demands of familial responsibility left her physically and mentally drained.

As a result, the works she created in recent years reflect this inner turbulence. Both in color palette and emotional tone, her pieces took on a more somber, introspective quality—a testament to the challenges of transition and the weight of care.

However, as time passed, what began as discomfort gradually gave way to familiarity and adaptation. With a growing sense of emotional stability, Jenny Chen’s works began to shift—her compositions became lighter, and her color palette more refined and subdued. In addition to this internal transformation, her recent practice also reflects a material evolution: the adoption of a new type of paint has expanded her visual vocabulary. Due to differences in composition and moisture content, these new materials introduced richer textures and layers through their drying and blending processes, imbuing the works with a heightened sense of movement and depth. Chen embraces the spontaneous effects generated by these materials, allowing their organic interactions to shape new visual rhythms and compositions. It is precisely through these transitions—both personal and technical—that her work has gradually moved away from the intense inwardness of earlier periods toward a more expansive, luminous presence, one that now carries a quiet sense of calm and resolution.

Rooted in Western Abstract Expressionism, the language of abstraction has inevitably prompted Eastern artists to reflect on their own subjectivity—often navigating cultural similarities and differences in an effort to assert a distinct position within a seemingly Western framework. Yet for Jenny Chen, this tension has never manifested as a form of opposition. Beneath the textures and rhythms of her work, she neither overtly emphasizes “Eastern-ness” nor fully conforms to Western forms. Instead, she forges a personal path—one that exists between fluid spontaneity and internal order.

For Chen, artmaking is a continuous process of experimentation, a search for the most fitting conditions under which art can emerge. Within the cycles of creation, death, and rebirth, she allows forms to evolve—breaking down established structures and reassembling them anew to give rise to fresh images and perceptions. This philosophy of transformation has long shaped her practice and reflects the core beliefs she has quietly upheld throughout her career.

At the heart of her work is a sustained inquiry into the relationship between humans and nature. Chen sees art as a response to life itself—an instinctive act that transcends time and space. She believes that this innate creative impulse guides her direction and forms the foundation of her artistic language.

In this solo exhibition, Jenny Chen not only continues her well-known practice in acrylic painting but also expands her creative vocabulary by venturing into a new series of collage works. These collages are composed of paint fragments—residue left behind as pigment dries and peels—collected and reassembled by the artist into a fresh visual language. Through this act of salvaging and recomposing, the fragments retain traces of time and memory, embodying the cycles of detachment, accumulation, and reuse. This new direction does not represent a stylistic leap, but rather a natural extension and evolution of Chen’s painterly language. It reflects her deepening command over material and composition, showcasing a mature sensitivity to both the tactile and formal elements of her work. Whether in her acrylic paintings or collage works, Chen’s latest works present a subtle shift from two-dimensional painting toward three-dimensional objecthood. This transition manifests not only in material and form, but also in the heightened visual tension across her surfaces—tension derived from the artist’s deliberate preservation and orchestration of spatial order.

The exhibition title As Life As Season: Spring Flows, Autumn Gathers does not refer to a linear progression of the four seasons or a unidirectional flow of time. Instead, it evokes a cyclical rhythm of perception—one that unfolds and interweaves throughout the creative process. For Chen, artmaking is not a journey from point A to point B, but a slow formation shaped by repeated sensations, reflection, and reconstruction—growing between the acts of flowing and gathering. Here, “spring” and “autumn” are not literal seasons, but emotional and mental states. Spring Flows symbolizes the stirring of emotion and the unfolding of spirit—like a quiet stream that nourishes all things silently, awakening dormant desires and creativity. In contrast, Autumn Gathers embodies the composure and wisdom gained through experience—like the stillness and depth of the earth after harvest, filled with a sense of quiet resolve. Together, these states reflect a rhythm that underpins Chen’s creative philosophy: not forward momentum, but cycles of emergence and consolidation, through which her work continues to evolve.

As Life As Season: Spring Flows, Autumn Gathers is a reflection on Jenny Chen herself, and on the acts of observation and gathering that have shaped her creative practice over the past two years. Even a brief glimpse into the layered experiences and quiet intensity at the core of her life reveals how she uses art to respond to moments of change, fortune, and adversity—gradually shaping a visual language and rhythm uniquely her own. As we move through the exhibition space, we are invited to enter the tempo of Chen’s contemplation—to search for and complete what remains unsaid. In doing so, we bear witness to the resonant harmonies within her compositions, and to the subtle choreography unfolding on each canvas.