B. 1995 LONDON, ENGLAND | L. BALI, INDONESIA
SELF TAUGHT ARTIST | BA, PHILOSOPHY & ANTHROPOLOGY
In Jade Ping’s practice, the act of painting becomes a means of reconciliation, a space where separation, memory, and desire meet in tension. The figures, often suspended between intimacy and isolation, operate as psychological landscapes rather than portraits. Their gestures are not merely expressive but an act of excavation, tracing the fragile border between what we reveal and what we conceal.
Her process inhabits what Nietzsche described as “the gaze into the abyss,” an encounter with the inner monsters we create and inherit. Yet, rather than resisting them, Ping invites these shadows to speak — transforming fear into recognition, fragmentation into form. In this way, the paintings function as quiet acts of integration: the artist and the image both becoming, un-becoming, and meeting in the middle.
Ping’s visual language moves through the liminal terrain of belonging and abandonment, of the self as both witness and participant. Through layering, erasure, and redefinition, her process mirrors the cycles of attachment and release — what she calls “the ritual of self-authorship.”
Her research draws from ideas of individuation, embodiment, and the shared condition of fragmentation within human relationships. In her words, painting becomes “a way of remembering what was never truly separate.” The works resist linear narrative, instead operating as emotional constellations — sites where conflict and connection coexist, where the personal dissolves into the collective.
What emerges is not the documentation of experience, but the transmutation of it: a quiet theology of repair that turns the language of abandonment into one of belonging.