Yen Chua has an inimitable charcoal style that is all her own, often inhabiting her paintings with a magical sensibility and a wide-eyed female persona that alternates between maiden, motherand mermaid. Her current preoccupation with the environment is evident in Until the Last Tree, where the compositions dance between nature and nurture. The Gaia series anthropomorphizes a fecund Mother Earth at one with the flora and fauna of her planetary existence. Next, the eponymous series of the show’s title interweaves an additional animal that predominates as the subject of the painting over the watchful Gaia. These monochromatic mixed media works on paper are dense with imagery and richly layered, combining a dark, seductive Gaia in charcoal, with silhouettes of trees and distant animals in ink, watery spreading effects, line drawings of flowers and grass, and highlights in white ink. The few canvas works burst into vivid colour when acrylic and charcoal are combined. Gazing at the works, it is apparent that Yen’s joy in our world is inseparable from her urgent environmental imperative of conservation and preservation. Artist’s statement This planet that we inhabit is both precious and rare. Amongst the billions of celestial bodiesthat populate our universe, it is [...]
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