Using a distinctive, hyper-stylized, Pop manner, Andrew Chin paints large, colorful pictures of stuffed toys, morsels of food and lit cigars. Occasionally part of a human figure might appear, as in the bright red lips seen in profile in a 6-by-14-foot painting titled Sex Saah! (2005), but generally Chin keeps people out of his paintings.
If Chin’s scenarios seem odd, his decision to accessorize every object in his paintings with short, eyelash-like strands of hair tips the balance toward the bizarre. While hair can be a thing of beauty, it is inherently unruly and in need of constant policing. The hairs in Chin’s paintings have been neither cut, plucked, nor shaven. What’s worse, they sprout out of the most unlikely objects: there are hairy cigars, hairy chopsticks, hairy food, hairy lips.
Chin, who lives in New York, has spoken of his paintings as reflecting his Asian heritage and his American existence. If the chopsticks signify Asia, could this hair be an oblique reference to the relative lack of body hair among Asian men?
Chin’s billboardlike format and deliberately kitschy imagery (this show featured a number of cute Koonsian animals) place him firmly in a Pop tradition. But his way of building imposing paintings from often pathetic components, and his quirky cast of symbolic forms, give his canvases a tragicomic flavor that seems closer in spirit to Philip Guston’s late work.