Quietly Growing Under the Moonlight

Luo-Han Chen

The paintings feel like psyche before symbol - matter gathering itself into emergence. They carry the tremor of formation: constellations flickering across a field that could be the night sky, cell structure, or a dream. Each form emerging as if remembered by the surface.

They work at the threshold between substance and spirit - what Bion might call the “preconception” of thought. The field receives projection, metabolises it, and gives it back as image. In one, a moth appears, its wings barely there - Eros rising out of the dark of Thanatos. In another, a tree, though its branches seem to breathe; and the form could just as easily be lungs.

Light also behaves like psyche: stains, seeps, returns. The granular texture reads as repression made visible - what is held back in consciousness dispersing into cosmic dust. Luo-Han Chen paints containment itself - the maternal field, the holding environment. Paintings of the unconscious in its natural state: unbounded, connective, seeking coherence.

What remains after looking is suspension - the same suspension felt between two breaths, between being and knowing.