For Thean Chie Chan painting creates identity. Here, on paper and canvas, Thean Chie Chan’s dilemma is resolved: the reciprocally contradicting elements that are inherent in his biography and character, the ambivalent and the unspoken, the sharply outlined and the ungraspable.

The decisive element in Thean Chie Chan’s images is based on their well-nigh uncanny logic. This mainly lies in the fact that he subjects his eccentricity to the cool calculation of the intellectually reflecting artist and vice versa. Thean Chie Chan’s clearly defined compositions also possess something bottomless, an energy that seeks to entice the observer to venture behind the world of motifs.

It is a world of motifs concentrated on the human face. Disembodied, single or in a staccato-type parade, held by ornaments and tendrils, or left solitary in the merciless monotony of the paint surface, these faces are parts of the drama of “Being-Human”, occasionally monstrous in effect, yet sometimes becalmed and contained.

Thean Chie Chan was born in 1972 in Penang, Malaysia. He studied at the Vienna University of Applied Arts in the master class of Christian Ludwig Attersee. He lives and works in Vienna.

Curator: Ingried Brugger