Jai Chuhan Artist, teacher, collaborator

Episode 3 of Season 2 of ARTiculate. I continue to talk to remarkable artists who inspire me in their pursuit of finding their authentic voice within their practise. In a time when it is dangerous to touch our friends, the sensitive touch embodied in a good painting is a genuine gift. They embody something of the human intelligence that made them. They are the products of care embedded in a surface through touch. They speak to us as physical bodies, and remind us of how that physicality connects us to the people around us and to the larger world. I had the pleasure of talking with Jai Chuhan who’s unique and expressive paintings are as she puts it ‘painterly exploration of displacement, conflict and desire challenging tropes of exploitation or celebration. Jai is an Indian born British artist who studied at UCL Slade School of Fine Art in the 80s and is currently based in Manchester. Her paintings are sculptural, thick with the texture of impasto paint giving her portraits a certain gravitas. The deliberate use of a vivid colour palette presents the female body as a physical and psychological presence, suggested by simplified geometric areas of colour and lines and shifting viewpoints. Anonymous figures observed in the city are complemented by portrayal of familiar people including self-portraits, using a combination of observation, memory and photographs. Jai’s thinks of her practise as an act of zoning in to process beginning with layers of marks. She invests her time in reworking each and every individual picture by erasing an image, after another image, negotiating with time and the image as an act of searching and finding a visual crystallization of ideas. Whether she uses thick impasto of pigments or thin washes that fill the canvas, whatever the method, it makes us as the viewer lose sense of time. Her genre of painting reflects her transcultural aesthetic influences. Jai’s work have been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally in solo including the Home and Unhome group show in China, and two solo shows for Asia Triennial Manchester 2018. Some of the prestigious institutions in the Uk include the Tate Liverpool; Barbican, London; Ikon, Birmingham; Arnolfini, Bristol, University of Cambridge; among many many other galleries and institutions.
Recent solo exhibitions include at People’s History Museum for Asia Triennial Manchester 2011; Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool 2013; Liverpool Biennial 2014; Gallery Oldham and at HOME for Asia Triennial Manchester 2018. Recent group exhibitions include at ArtANKARA Contemporary Art Fair, Turkey 2020.