Commentary by Yashica Dhabre
Serene Chen’s painting practice engages language not for its clarity or communicative precision, but for its oldest, most primal residue: motion, implication, the trace of intention. Her work investigates symbol and symbolic meaning not by making overt symbolic gestures, but by examining the gesture of the symbol itself—its form, its ambiguity, its capacity to flicker between figuration and suggestion.
Serene’s engagement with symbolic structure is deeply informed by Jonathan Culler’s semiotics and Gestalt principles. She does not treat symbols as direct transmitters of meaning, but as relational forms—shaped by context, culture, and perception. A shadow, a dove, in a hand, a moon: these are not stable signs, but open fields. Meaning is never delivered; it is always approached, suspended.
This logic is informed by a deep historical awareness. The history of painting predates formalized language—certainly structured systems like the English alphabet. While letters serve as elemental units of language, painting operates through a looser, more interpretive syntax, where symbols are not defined but instead charged with shifting, unstable meanings. Serene uses this instability not as a gap to be resolved, but as the central premise of her work.
Her compositions reflect this premise. Forms often hover over raw linen, which she allows to remain unpainted—especially in places where one might expect the illusion to be fully resolved. These interruptions reveal the constructedness of the image, even as they support it. The painting becomes both an illusion and its own undoing, a site where gesture, image, and surface collide.
But Serene’s painting neither confirms nor denies any specific narrative. Instead, it lets the story dissolve into the visual logic of the image: rabbit, moon, chart, night. The gridded structure behind the moon could be a calendar, a radar screen, a placeholder for something else entirely. The rabbit’s posture feels uncertain rather than graceful. What emerges is a map of narrative possibility. The viewer can choose how to read—or whether to read at all.
This symbolic ambiguity is central to Serene’s practice. In another work, a dove hovers against a gold wall. Its body splits into seven chromatic lines, like a prism revealing light’s inner structure. The familiar symbol—often associated with peace or divinity—fractures. The painting does not reject the dove’s history, but stretches it. Unity disperses. Meaning seems to multiply with or without specified contexts.
Ultimately, Serene’s paintings do not resolve into meaning—they reside in its potential. Her symbols are precise in form but diffuse in purpose. They are not signs that deliver, but forms that suggest. Rather than using painting to assert clarity, she uses it to carefully dissolve it. What emerges is a language of suspension: a quiet, deliberate unfixing. A return to the moment before symbols settled into code.
Education
2019 - 2023
School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2023 - 2025
LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
Exhibitions
2022
Interspecies | Interspace, 80 w.Broadway St
2022
Resonant Voice of the Soul , Caelum Gallery
2023
Conjure: LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting Fall Exhibition , Sheila & Richard Riggs Gallery
2024
Caesura: Leroy E. Hoffberger School of Painting Exhibition , 1305 W MtRoyal Ave
2025
Dialogues of the Disaphora, Terrell Arts DC.
2025
LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting MFA Thesis Exhibition, the Peale