Biography
Jen Chau is an artist currently living in Lisbon. Born in the United States, and raised in Hong Kong, Jen has lived in Hong Kong, USA, UK, and now Portugal. She graduated with a BA in Commercial/Advertising Photography from Brooks Institute of Photography, California and an MA in Art Psychotherapy from Roehampton University, London. She began her career in commercial and advertising photography in Los Angeles, CA before working as an Art Psychotherapist in London. She studied painting at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, Essential School of Painting in the UK, and the Turps Correspondence Course. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions in London, Lisbon, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Artist Statement
My practice is shaped by a life lived across cultures and geographies, where stability has been intermittent, and where movement and change have also been a chosen way of life. Through drawing and painting, I explore how a sense of home and belonging might be constructed and sustained under impermanent conditions. Across different projects, I return to questions of home, coexistence, memory, and the conditions under which continuity can take form without becoming fully fixed. Rather than working through a single fixed method, I develop processes that are responsive to the particular conditions of each body of work. Painting allows me to hold these tensions in material form: presence and distance, surface and depth, familiarity and estrangement, structure and instability. Across the work, home emerges not as a settled fact, but as something provisional, shaped and reshaped over time. While rooted in personal experience, the work speaks to a broader condition in which home is not simply given, but continually negotiated—whether through choice, necessity, or constraint.
