In 2014 before Crystal Chan went to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York, she held her first solo exhibition in Macau. As the curator of that exhibition, I saw that she was fuelled with a curiosity toward art but was at the same time filled with doubts. With the charcoal in her hand, she depicted the people around her with lines. Proportion and realism was not what she was interested in. Instead, she used the traces of her strokes to express a world of sentiments. After 4 years she has now graduated from her studies. I suggested to curate a solo exhibition for her again. The current exhibition “Idle hands are the devil's playthings” features a series of paintings created by Crystal during the years from 2016 to 2018 when she was in New York.
Knowing Crystal for some years now, I have witnessed how she fell in love with drawing and painting intuitively. And how her determination see her through the entrance exam of an internationally renowned art academy, 4 years of studies and hard work in order to pay an expensive tuition fees and living in the New York City. After these years of experience, she comes out with these paintings which permeate a more mature yet intimate feeling. The colours and strokes undulate on the surface of these paintings, transforming what once were distinct edges and corners of a line into a field of expressions.
As for her doubts, they seem to have disappeared together with the strokes.
Crystal says that she likes Qi Baishi’s paintings as well as Fernando Pessoa’s poetry. Born in Macau, she is a combination of the East and the West. As an Asian female artist, she has drawn attention with her work when she was studying in the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2017 she won the Will Barnet Award issue by the National Arts Club and has held two solo exhibitions in New York in 2018.
Her work carries strong influence from Expressionism in which she travels through the distorted lines of Egon Schiele to the colour blocks of Edvard Munch. What she is depicting is never the appearance of what reality presents but the inner state of emotions. Leaving Macau to New York, Crystal has blurred the boundaries of the shapes she is creating. It is her way to break through the limitations. The once strongly distortion of line is now softened into strokes of brushes. The melancholic colour tones are coercing and overlaying one another, creating a series of emotional scenes. The maturity of her work is anchored in her mastering of the painting method which is based on her understanding of the self. That is why even though the appearance of her paintings is somehow ambiguous but the emotional power of her work has revealed itself in clarity during this process of artistic pursuit.
Qi Baishi said once, “Painting is a lonesome path. If one can endure the loneliness, then there are a hundred things to be achieved.” What Qi Baishi pointed out here between the painter and his/her work is something that Crystal has certainly known. She titled the current exhibition with the idiom “idle hands are the devil's playthings” which suggests that when someone has nothing to do, one is more likely to get into trouble. Crystal left her hometown to New York, facing the path that she has chosen for herself. I imagine the countless moments of loneliness that she has experienced, trying to find a way out in the sea of her own memories. Crystal has a sensitive nature and feelings seem to be everything to her. But who can really understand the depth of one’s own feeling? She endures the lonesomeness and started painting with her idle hands. Her paintings come from her dreams and her brushes free her subconsciousness out into the open wilderness where the faceless protagonists dwell. The devil’s playthings? Maybe. But what she really cares is the blurry boundaries between existence. The space between the past and the dream is her canvas. Her heart and her mind interwoven, at the end, she is not only her own landscape, but the silent scenery of a spiritual journey in front of our eyes.
Curator
Alice Kok