Kristy Chan: “Painting feels like an endless stew”

In many ways, this past year has been a victory lap for Kristy Chan. Since her autumn 2024 solo show at Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing, the 28-year-old painter has featured in Soho Revue’s summer group show, ‘Immaterial’ and completed a residency at Dragon Hill, Mouans-Sartoux, France. Now, her latest exhibition, ‘To Autumn’, opens at Plaster during Frieze Week in London. Chan has a different attitude towards painting than some of the other artists I’ve spoken with. In her Shoreditch studio, she tells me that the easiest way to describe her relationship with painting is “to see it as a person”. Whether that replicates a tense relationship with a friend or starting up a new relationship, Chan manages to break out of these “weird vicious cycles” to reflect on what she’s made: “then I’m like ‘this is amazing, life is great,’” she laughs. While it might seem fraught and unpredictable, this balance of love and frustration is the perfect breeding ground for emotionally charged works. “Some paintings stay angry, some mellow out a bit,” she adds.

‘To Autumn’ gathers that turbulence into a series of new abstract paintings and a limited edition run of 20 prints of her new smaller works on paper. The starting point was a small tree Chan would pass on her walks from Brick Lane to Broadway Market. “It’s been chopped down now, but it was really beautiful. It had all the colours of autumn.” It was around this time last year that she stumbled across John Keats’ 1819 poem, To Autumn. “It all just felt like a perfect match. All the paintings are about yearning for autumn, my favourite season. It’s this really beautiful transitional phase of the weather and human emotion.” Chan traces this change through different palettes: one of rusts and charcoals and another more luminous. Her Woodland Almanac diptych is inspired by ecologist Aldo Leopold’s writings on American nature and the minutiae of seasonal change, and sits alongside Draba, a large canvas flooded with vibrant hues of yellows, pinks and purples – an elegy to the final days of spring. “I love the way Leopold wrote about the little signs of spring. But I think I’m done with my nature phase.”

What phase is next? “I’m thinking about doing Hyrox. I’ve also started ballroom dancing classes. I thought it would be fun to learn, then when I’m older I can be a very glamorous granny.” There’s a playfulness to Chan and her work, but also an echo of the same restless energy that animates her paintings: a refusal to stagnate. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art before doing an MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s. “When I graduated from Slade, I was scared shitless, I didn’t know if I could sustain myself as a painter,” she tells me. “It didn’t seem like a feasible career. I didn’t grow up around artists. My parents had a very ‘you grow up and you make money’ attitude.” When Covid came along, Chan got “stuck inside” painting and began to make sales. “It was becoming viable.”

Now, she moves between London and Hong Kong, where she grew up. When she visits home every year or so, she paints in the glass house her parents once built for their dog. “It’s bittersweet and also very useful,” she says. “Weirdly, when I paint at home it feels more performative because I know if my parents are there, they’re probably watching. They smoke heavily so I can smell them before they even come into the room,” she laughs.

If her practice seems shaped by external forces – weather, space, a breakup, the tree on a London street corner – that’s exactly the point. “Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue said, ‘I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.’ That’s very much how I work,” she reflects. ‘To Autumn’ unfolds through paintings that churn and soften, moving with the rhythm of the changing seasons, all in Chan’s signature disorienting, kaleidoscopic style. The show captures a longing for change and also speaks to Chan’s belief in painting as a vessel for everything messy, contradictory and unresolved. “Because each painting takes so long, I kind of go through all these cycles of emotions. Looking at a painting the day after I’ve worked on it is sort of like when you have an argument. In the heat of the moment you say all these things, but then a few hours later you’re like, ‘holy shit, why did I say that!?’”

Despite their autumnal titles and literary anchors, the paintings remain something to be “solved” as Chan puts it. Some canvases brew for months, congested and heavy with layers of paint. One piece in her studio she’s been wrestling with all year, describing it bluntly: “This painting feels like an endless stew. It’s very, very laboured – there’s so much crap.” Yet she refuses shortcuts. Sometimes she will scrap canvases outright – “fuck you, goodbye, à la poubelle!” – other times she flips them, obliterates them with fresh paint, or simply leaves them to sit until she sees them differently. “I do think being able to let go of something can be a good thing,” she says. “I’m actually not a very sentimental person when it comes to objects. I love throwing things away.”

A much smaller diptych, Totteridge Yew, accompanies Chan’s larger canvases. “I started painting them when I was outside, and then I’d finish them indoors. I was looking at Edvard Munch’s The Sun a lot for inspiration. I really wanted to capture light at different times of day. They’re not extensions of the other works, they’re just nice additions.” Large canvases allow her to sweep and roam, while small ones compress and intensify the act of painting. But mid-sized canvases? “I struggle with the idea of how you can expand. And I’ve always hated squares.”

What I found most interesting about talking with Chan was understanding her relationship with this tension. She lets things simmer until the fronds and scum bubble to the surface, ready to surprise her. Like the season it invokes, ‘To Autumn’ is about the beauty and discomfort of being in-between. “At some point you’re like, ‘oh, this feels nice, this feels like it’s working,’” she says. That fleeting recognition is enough.