Nanxi Jin is an artist who grew up in China and came to the United States at sixteen. She currently lives and works in Chicago. She obtained a BFA degree in Art & Design from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2020. She was accepted to the School of Art Institute of Chicago in fall 2020.
Being a Chinese artist living in the United States for the last ten years has created tension between my early years in China. Consuming art concerned with harmony, nature, and composition, and my art training in the US, where I was encouraged to learn the rules to break them. Now my work combines my fondness for harmony with the color, conceptual leanings, and unrestricted expression I have found in Western aesthetics.
I present sculptures and installations that express the notion of time and space. Architecture in the city has always been my inspiration. City skylines bring traditional Chinese landscape paintings to mind, substituting mountains for buildings. The space between the interlaced and complicated buildings reminds me of the white space in scattered perspective landscape paintings valued by many Asian artists. In the paintings, this white space is intentional, while in the cityscape, the “white space” is purely negative space created by the city’s growth and its need to build higher. This leads me to work more organically.
I mimic the impressionistic gestures found in these traditional works by touching and pinching clay. I use clay to decorate space, accentuate form, and pass the time. Tapping the soft clay results in an imprinted surface, creating a visual and material record of time passing. I enjoy collaborating with space. I challenge myself to explore the space in different environments, find the space, understand the space, and document the space as my work.