Jinbin Chen

Jinbin Chen’s delicate color palettes create environments that house his male subjects in themes of vulnerability, fragility, honesty, and comfort. These spaces seek to uncover a language of intimacy that excludes the sexually explicit, and rather, paint his own vocabulary of desire: a vernacular that absorbs a viewer’s gaze. In his portraiture, the masculine traverses a terrain of liminal gender dispositions that embrace the freedom of becoming sans societal boundaries of gender. In its essence, Chen’s work depicts the encounter of bodies, those significant and seemingly insignificant, that have the potential to impact the trajectory of one’s life. Bridging his practice to the personal, Chen excavates topics on gender temperament, sexuality, inbetweeness, the abject, identification and differentiation.