Tokyo Gendai

Completed in the past year, Quin’s paintings reinvigorate color and compress the energies of her previous works into a succinct, small-scale format. Quin describes these canvases as attempts to explore the synchronicity through which abstraction and signification become entangled.

Starting from an underpainting of recurring graphic and painterly forms that persist and migrate between works, Quin accumulates layers of painted and printed marks, over which she incises, brushes, or scrapes porous fields of sinuous, fragmentary planes, filigrees, and tubes. Her excavated surfaces suggest a nonlinear temporality, frustrating any sense of narrativity. Instead, individual relationships between marks become their own dramatic events, with a simultaneous, excessive, and aggravated wholeness arising from stark and inseparable forms. “I am invested in the way the small parts are knitted together,” Quin explains, “Negative marks become positive, using chance and control in equal measure. I layer decisions in search of a harmonious sensitivity.”

In her newest works, Quin enacts multiple strategies in response to past canvases, searching for this moment of sensitivity. “Each painting leads to the next,” she says, “but like a bundle of nerves, they cannot be pulled apart into clean pieces.” With its dark, dense surface, Tannin (2026) becomes a kind of chemical inversion of the airier Eyelets of Alkaline (2025)—acid meeting base. In canvases like Bearings (2026), color leaks into the composition like a ship taking on water, while other paintings embrace chromatic potency to recapitulate and develop shared underlying problems of composition, structure, and form. Quin describes these movements as comprising “a self-annulling activity, an interest in obliviating forward gesture.”

Creating paintings at a significantly smaller size while approaching the gestural intensities at work in her larger paintings posed a productive challenge for Quin. The resulting works are aesthetically kindred, equally compelling in their own right yet fundamentally altered in their approach to density and detail. In her larger works, Quin often allows the paint and ink to hatch and blend across the surface; here, however, she works with the smallest instruments she can find, necessitating a shift in procedures and testing her prior understanding of both the medium and the characteristics of her marks.

In all their iterations, Quin’s paintings are involved in the objectivity of abstraction. Her works animate multiple emotional registers, holding disparate aesthetic associations in dynamic suspension. Quin’s abstraction begins in the gap between language and thing—between what can be felt and what can be said—depicting the unsayable while allowing it to remain unsaid. The symbolic or imagistic content at the heart of her paintings is therefore always shrouded in a kind of mystery. “When I am inside a painting, I am seeking to describe a certain synchronicity that I have found in the world,” says Quin. “There is a magnetic distance between what we can name and what we can feel. Symbols and words pollinate each other. This is an exercise of superstitious abstraction, and the answer is different every time. My favorite and most potent images tend to feel like they were waiting for me all along.”