Aircraft 15

Chen Chien-Jung’s ‘Landscape’ and ‘Aircraft’ series feature scenery that the artist has foreseen and the situations that play out there. The works allude to images of urban civilization and uses architectural spaces as a motif, or visual language. His compositions avoid excessive pre-planning, retaining an organic painting process that allows the motion of the hand to provide vital engagement while introducing the use of everyday objects as paint tools such as disposable wooden sticks and masking tape that can be used repeatedly.
Chen's works enquire into the essence of painting, and at times are filled with a defiant challenge. Painting at its height and most rare uses its medium to evoke influence and an energy that transcends its materiality. While people usually cultivate, presume or construct meaning within themselves, when viewing a painting, it is a moment when the material space and the viewer’s internal space overlap each other, this experience constitutes the uniqueness of painting and its appreciation. This sense of familiarity also becomes what people always hope to find within painting. However, Chen tries to resist these pleasant conditions of comfort, appreciation and unity, he attempts to open up another dialogue of painting, the use of materials, and the definition of classical forms. Finding the gaps in re-understanding painting and detecting the possibility of reinterpreting the established rules of real and imagined, reveals a hidden facet of understanding Chen’s work, one of a nomadic figure constantly defecting from definition.