Jing Qin
Region: South
City / State: Knoxville, TN
The truth may reside behind absurdity. Fantasy may come from
reality. Surrealism is more real than realism. My works do not
come from my personal experience and surroundings alone,
but exist as a hybridization of Chinese scenarios and Southern
daydreams. I consider myself the ghostwriter of my works. In
them, the “I” is reduced to a minimum.
Though I am aware of being both the narrator and creator of my
paintings, the narratives remains undefined. Instead, they are
generated by my unconscious, then developed and formed by the
experience of viewers. I set my characters in a flatness that I call
a nonlogical space. The ambiguity of their gender and skin tones
make them abnormal, even uncanny. They seemingly engage
in meaningless tasks while holding ordinary poses, blending
the odd with the ordinary.
This ambiguity comes from the supernatural being presented as
the mundane, and vice versa. I’m interested in prompting viewers
to call into question the limits of narration, making psychological
realism and surreal flights of fancy indistinguishable.