Secret Garden- A New Collection

I'M PLEASED TO SHARE A FEW RECENT MOMENTS FROM MY ART PRACTICE, INCLUDING MY SECRET GARDEN COLLECTION AND CURRENT EXHIBITIONS IN VANCOUVER AND WEST VANCOUVER. IF YOU’D LIKE TO READ THE FULL UPDATE, YOU CAN FIND IT HERE:

Read the Secret Garden newsletter (pdf)

On “Secret Garden” Series….

My practice engages water as both image and epistemological surface—one that mediates between perception and the subconscious. The canvas functions as a liminal field, akin to the surface of water, where internal and external realities converge and continuously reshape one another. 

Working through a semi-abstract language, I resist fixed representation, allowing forms to emerge through a process of intuitive layering. These gestures operate less as depictions of landscape and more as registrations of affect, memory, and perceptual instability. The resulting image hovers between recognition and dissolution. 

Drawing from Gaston Bachelard’s poetics in Water and Dreams, water is approached not as a passive reflective device, but as an active, generative force—one that produces images rather than merely reproducing them. In this framework, reflection becomes a dynamic act, implicating both viewer and surface in a reciprocal exchange.

The work proposes a contemplative space in which vision is slowed, and the act of seeing is reoriented inward. Here, landscape is not a fixed site, but a fluid construct—formed through the interplay of presence, perception, and the subconscious….

From the Artist Statement for The Dreaming- Alissa Kim Tjen