Stillness between us

A year living in Tokyo, apart from loved ones and in linguistic isolation, Kevin Chin paints. While depicting the schism one feels when out of water, he brings accord to the fictional panoramic scenes that have stayed with him, with dexterity and finesse. The result, his five-panel painting Between Bridges, is iridescent, its colour and warmth a contrast to the stillness of the image and the secluded space in which Chin paints. Comparing the experience to a silent Vipassana meditation, he describes days on end spent without speaking, and the paradox of feeling at once foreign, but connected to all around.

A shared horizon line and the depth in the water’s duplicitous mirror image provides a portal beyond the scope of the panoramas’ edge. Influenced by an audio-book backing track of Murakami’s 1Q84, which sees its protagonists venture to an alternate universe in order to meet and play out their romantic end, the solitary figures in Between Bridges, gaze longingly, meeting in daydreams alone. Structured like the multi-paneled Edo-period paintings in the temples of Kyoto, Chin draws on his Japanese experience and that of the Chinese watercolours that hung in his childhood home. Memory and contemplation can canvas time, and the play in the painting Less Than White shows girls in a vast and snowy landscape. Here, Chin works with a white-primed canvas, which amid the snow creates solid and negative space, better representing the imperfect ways memories are captured.

Kevin Chin, Less than White, at This Is No Fantasy.