Jean Huang

My practice is an exploration of the outer landscape and how it in turn reflects the change of time, weather, and seasonality in my inner landscape. Each site-specific painting begins as an unstretched canvas carried on a hike, inviting the local ecology, landscape, and weather to directly collaborate in the process. Traces of the environment such as rock, tree bark, and rain provide evidence of the land’s agency, while differences in materiality, textures, and palette reflect the specific characteristics of each site. A reciprocal relationship is formed in balancing my own marks with the initial marks left by the environment. The paintings allude to the experience of a landscape, oscillating between an abstracted macroscopic view and an intimate microscopic perspective.

The paintings are also akin to well-travelled maps embedded with stories: dirt on the edges, places of significance marked, and wrinkles from the many times they were folded and unfolded. Through the methods of frottage and co-creation, I depart from the artist’s gaze on landscapes by painting through touch and feeling. I draw on themes of friendship and play, inviting moments of connection with the land. Painting occurs through physical engagement with the site: body movement as gestural marks, apparent in a random boot print or a subtle tracing of how I sat on the painting to rest. Incorporating my full body into the work evokes a sense of belonging and suggests that I am as much a part of the landscape as it is of me.