Baixuan Chen

Images, ideas, and emotions are produced, multiplied, and discarded before they can be absorbed. The ego of authorship has long collapsed under this flood. No one can hold space. All that remains is an endless countdown, subtracting moments before the absolute collapse. Swallowing breaths in order to hold on to memory. Baixuan Chen (b. 1997, Shanghai) sees in this not defeat but potential. She claims hope where others give up. In her first exhibition at Jan Kaps, she paints a world on the brink. Her images subvert the condition of total content overload by compressing tension into the sparsest of means—like the tiniest diamond the world has ever seen. Baixuan Chen pares painting back to an irrational minimum. Her economy of means produces suspension. A bathtub with half a face and a fish tail (Evidence of Water), three bodies that share only four arms (As If Someone Deserved the Cheer): each scene halts transformation at the instant it becomes visible. What interests Chen is not metamorphosis itself, but what follows it—the charged condition after a shift has taken place, when forms have already changed yet their meaning remains unsettled. Like Kafka, she does not reveal the cause of transformation, but holds us in the existential tension that comes after. Her paintings suspend figures in quasi-frozen threshold states: liminal moments between identities, times, and realities. In other works language itself becomes part of the atmosphere, their titles like mathematical problems or fragments caught in the drift. Everyday spaces and nature, too, undergo this shift: appearing at first familiar, only to turn subtly strange. The effect recalls Freud’s notion of the uncanny—when what is closest to us becomes estranged. Yet in Chen’s case, the uncanny does not erupt as fear, but as latent unease: a quiet vibration between intimacy and alienation. What remains is lean, deliberate, and unsettling: a visual economy that insists on holding attention where speed demands distraction. The stillness in Chen’s paintings carries the density of Balthus: a silence so charged it turns into suspense. But where Balthus left his figures on the brink of action, Chen removes the brink itself. She strips her scenes of movement altogether. She works with potential rather than resolution, using tension to resist the quick fix of satisfaction. Chen’s restraint is not about withholding for mystery’s sake. It is compositional judgment. Large fields of color, marked by gesture and brushstroke, let atmosphere outweigh detail. “Clarity destroys certain possibilities,” she notes. By leaving forms open and interspersed—faces with ambiguous features, bodies that refuse alignment—she sustains a state in which heaviness and lightness, familiarity and strangeness coexist. Baixuan Chen’s radical economy mirrors a world that drifts further into abstraction and non-meaning every day. In a culture of endless circulation, her paintings drift and swerve as if pulled with a handbrake at full speed. They insist on resistance by holding the line: images that remain dense, charged, and resistant to collapse. Her paintings make transformation visible before the world rushes to consume and erase it.