James Jean is a Taiwanese-American artist celebrated for his surreal synthesis of Eastern and Western aesthetics. Blending mythology, dreams, and cultural symbols, he crafts poetic visual worlds where emotion and subconscious intertwine between reality and fantasy.
These works trace Jean’s evolving vision of desire, memory, and myth. AIDES LAPIN fuses human and rabbit forms to express primal instinct, MAZE evokes introspective time through childlike imagery, and DRAGON II merges Eastern and Western motifs, forming a lyrical narrative of dream and rebirth.
James Jean’s art embodies the poetics of image and the narrative of the subconscious. His material framework relies on fluid layering and translucent color, using acrylics and oils to create dreamlike ambiguity. This materiality reflects Gilles Deleuze’s idea of becoming—the image as a dynamic field of transformation rather than a fixed representation. Jean’s methodology fuses literary storytelling, Eastern ink-inspired openness, and Western compositional tension, making time and emotion flow within detail.
His works act as architectures of visual memory, merging mythic and contemporary sensibilities into a cross-cultural language of introspection. For my practice, Jean inspires me to treat material and form as emotional extensions—using texture, light, and layered structures to evoke memory’s blur and time’s passage.
He teaches me that art can function as a “psychological space,” one that captures fleeting consciousness rather than depicting reality. In my miniature sculptures, I draw from his fluid compositional rhythm, building spaces that become theatres of inner emotion—where dream and reality gently converge.
#surrealism #dream and reality #memory and imagination #mythology and symbolism #Eastern and Western fusion #detailed composition
Image credit & website:
https://www.instagram.com/jamesjeanart/
Written on: 7 September 2025
Ning-Hui Chung 
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