Setting Off Alone From the Far Side of the Moon
LNM, Oslo20th April - 27th May, 2025
Jinbin Chen's paintings depict a world of sensual possibilities. In them, a portrait's gaze is an invitation for an encounter. Glands suggest both power and vulnerability. Hands gestures with multiple meanings. For his solo exhibition, Setting Off Alone From the Far Side of the Moon, Chen presents a series of fantastical oil paintings on canvas and paper whose subjects are aware of their bodily instincts.
One inspiration for these works include the Ming dynasty opera, "The Peony Pavilion," about a girl sheltered all her life in her home. Upon catching a glimpse of a garden, her first glimpse of the outside world, her senses are so stirred that a desire to love arises. Another inspiration for Chen is the Omegaverse of Danmei, a homoerotic fiction genre popular in East Asia. In it, binary gender roles are reimagined through Alpha, Beta, and Omega designations. The characters possess both male and female reproductive organs and sweat glands, emitting pheromones in heat cycles. Both references share a view of human nature; one brought to life by sensory experience and the aliveness of oscillating between free and captive, dominant and submissive.
Painting from photos he has taken or found online, Chen fragments and then merges them directly on the canvas, building multiangled worlds, such as in The Deified Omega and His Angel Gland. This weaving of material from different sources is also a metaphor for Chen's organic approach to creating exhibitions. Each work might have an individual inspiration, but together, they produce a multifaceted meditation of power dynamics, desire and encounter.
Chen's paintings here are primarily in smaller formats, asking for intimate viewing. He also works with a colour palette that suggests its subjects are lit in an otherworldly light, as in A Dream Within a Dream. Here, rendered in blue, purple and pink tones is a large glowing egg held above a figure's penis, against their abdomen. In Farewell, two disembodied hands hook thumbs like a bird flapping its wings (or are they hands waving farewell?). In Emergence Failure, an outstretched hand holds an egg that failed to hatch, a life cycle unfulfilled. In a room full of vulnerable glands and visceral imagery, an oval canvas portraying a hand holding a glinting steel cleaver.
These works are meant to be felt by instinct, like an animal catching the scent of something. These images depict the moments when pupils expand and blood vessels dilate. The bodies in these paintings are receptive, sensing one another, caught in moments of excitement and response. Chen creates charged spaces where small happenings can lead to more immense consequences.
-Gabrille Paré
Image courtesy of LNM and Standard(Oslo)