Nai-Jen approaches painting as a verb, asking what is painting to her through the act of making. Instead of what to paint, Nai-Jen thinks about how to paint. Before starting a painting, she will decide how she is going to paint it — what kind of fabric, marks, and colours she is going to use? Drawing inspiration from both the process of painting itself and life experience, she closely observes how materials respond to her actions and makes work that reflects a continuous negotiation between herself and painting.
Her current body of work is developed within a set of self-imposed constraints. Working with a restrained palette that shifts subtly alongside repetitive use of simple gestures across different fabrics, she creates surfaces that resist immediate legibility. Like cloud formation, constantly drifting and ever-changing, Nai-Jen’s paintings hint toward the subtle shifts of lightness, darkness, stillness and silence; probing the light that cascades on the horizon or at a season’s edge. They ask for time, proximity, and movement, inviting the viewer into a state where perception unfolds through duration and attention.
