Yi-Chiao Chen’s work hits you with this odd mix of freshness and weight. It’s slippery, hard to pin down. Beautiful, yes, but also kind of eerie-like. The recurring water imagery is all over, but it doesn’t settle into one mood. Sometimes it’s calming, almost meditative. Other times it swells into something darker, like a current you can’t quite see the bottom of. You end up drifting in it, half-caught, half-carried. Her paintings almost feel like they’re moving when they’re not.
That’s the uncanny part. The surfaces ripple with this sense of motion, like water frozen mid-fall. A weird paradox: stillness that refuses to stay still. She manages to catch that space where something is about to change, but hasn’t yet. You can feel the in-between state vibrating.
It reminds me of Weiskel’s “humanistic sublime,” though not in a showy way. More in the quiet persistence of it. You’re left with this thought that something small — a brushstroke, a shift in color — can open up a whole depth of meaning. It lingers, sneaks back later when you’re not looking.
And then, if you pull back and think of water the way myth has always treated it — as both a threat and a birth — the resonance gets heavier. Eliade wrote about immersion as a return to origins, the washing away of the old. That’s there, under the surface of Chen’s canvases. Her paint seems to dissolve itself, layer into layer, until you get this sense of eternal motion. No end, no start. Just a loop of renewal.
Some moments are oddly tender. Her textures can spark this childlike wonder, like the way Baudelaire once described the artist’s “ecstatic gaze.” There’s light flickering against shadow, suggestion playing against clarity. You think you see one thing, then it slips. That innocence — or maybe it’s openness — gives the work its psychological charge. It’s both primal and oddly personal, like the ecstatic states shamans write about.
Chen herself calls the process “self-burning.” Which sounds dramatic, but it fits. These aren’t paintings trying to capture objects. They’re more like documents of energy, of a cycle she’s living through. Each one feels like it’s vibrating with something left behind, or maybe still in motion.
What really keeps me hooked is the balance she rides between the familiar and the elusive. It’s just clear enough that you think you know what you’re looking at, and then it slips out of reach. The forms float between presence and absence. The Latin root “concresce” — to grow together — comes to mind. Her works feel like they’re growing in front of you, permanent and fleeting at once.
And light. Always light. Especially in pieces like Blue 11. Deep indigos cut through with sudden glints of gold. The contrast carries a metaphor almost too neatly — darkness pierced by inner radiance, resilience holding its ground. Yet it works. You can practically feel the energy crackling across the surface, something bigger than the frame.
In the end, her art circles around existence, memory, impermanence. Things that vanish, but not without leaving a trace. Keats said, “the moving waters [perform] their priestlike task of pure ablution.” That’s the line I kept thinking about. Chen’s water doesn’t just depict — it enacts. It cleanses, renews, unsettles. You walk away haunted, like you’ve brushed up against something both ancient and strangely alive.
