Jialin Ren (b.1993, lives and studies in Vancouver and Chicago), finished her BFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2016. She is currently a candidate for MFA 2022 at SAIC.

Jialin Ren’s paintings reveal the complex emotions, between familiarity and strangeness, between the quotidian and the fantastical, between representation and abstraction. These schisms also evoke the interrelationship between self-doubt and confidence. She entwines these opposing sentiments by depicting and exaggerating the ordinary and the overlooked, employing plants to engender familiarity and imaginary spaces. The limited description of the space and the distorted scale of common objects engage the viewer psychologically, questioning the authenticity of conventional time and space.