Tears roll down her cheeks. No sobbing, or the sound of breathing.

I said, “Your work looks somewhat sad.”

“Last night, a man I love called and said he will marry.”

Jinny Chin’s work, if seen through photos, can be mistaken for painting or metal craft. Chin applies pigments dozens of times to ceramic plates, biscuit fired, and daubs repetitively to earn conte painting-like tenderness and abundant texture.

Pigments look like conte, ink painting, and at times metal like graphite through her repetitive drawing and firing like a magic.

Her early work appears delightful and nimble, like a spring garden, due to her use of diverse colors. Her colors became simplified when she embarked on her box work, inspired by a Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2008. 

Her boxes are hexahedral, some abstract, with abbreviated images overlapping, some projected, breathing with her will and emotion.

She appears naked, but chaste and elegant. Her gestures are dreamy, while her expressions appear vague.

Her gestures and severed overlapped body represents curiosity and conflicts of desire, based on her view of value and pride. Her own world, the moon appearing in the top, not the side, seems all she can feel and see.

Her box is the womb she lived in for 10 months; it is her mother’s infinite love; the world she belongs to; a troubled love affair; her memory of a middle-age woman.

Work, love, future --- all are ambiguous. She dreams through her work, compromises, and seeks self through sensibility.

Unexpected tears fall down from her determined eyes, and flow in her work serenely.