soot(he) is a meditation on quiet presence and elemental landscape. Exploring the dichotomy of immigrant and indigenous culture, Stephen Chen develops his own ink brush / sumi painting style and technique for rarely-seen and rarely-photographed landscapes of the Canadian Arctic along an ancient route traversed by the Inuit. The work approaches place through restraint, breath, and absence as much as mark-making. The compositions are intentionally sparse, allowing silence, negative space, and gesture to carry as much meaning as form.
Unlike landscapes rendered as spectacle, soot(he) treats the land as something encountered rather than claimed. Brushwork unfolds slowly, echoing glacial movement and ancestral routes, acknowledging histories that precede representation. The work does not seek to document the Arctic, but to listen to it—to translate atmosphere into gesture.
This attentiveness grows out of earlier investigations in deBorder, where cultural boundaries dissolve through material flow, and E.Mo., where landscape is felt through emotional distance. In soot(he), these concerns converge: boundaries soften, absence becomes spaciousness, and landscape is approached not as an object, but as a relationship.
CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 07/24/2024
