Ralph Maratta
Jiemei Lin
Eric Chan
April 3 – April 25
First Friday Opening Reception: April 3, 5 – 7PM
Exhibit Sponsor:
Debra Clerf – Coldwell Banker Central
Main Gallery
Jiemei Lin – Tidal Bore
BIO
Jiemei Lin was born in Hangzhou, China, and lives and works in Washington State. Lin works with digital and traditional media to create paintings, murals, and illustrations. Her works frequently take on themes of individual and cultural identity with a particular emphasis on design and color. Lin is an award-winning children’s book illustrator; her illustrated works represent and communicate with all audiences from underrepresented groups in her visual language. Lin has been designing and executing large-scale public murals in the Pacific and inland Northwest as a public artist. These murals function like vignettes or moments of stories, inviting the viewer into the scene to imagine possible narratives. Lin teaches illustration and digital design at WSU as an assistant professor.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Seeds is an ongoing body of paintings and ceramic installations that grows from my long fascination with small things—those quiet fragments of life that often pass unnoticed yet carry emotional weight. As a child, my attention to details was often seen as an unusual fixation, but over time I came to understand these observations as seeds: beginnings of ideas, memories, and emotions that slowly take root. In this series, seeds, sprouts, roots, and petals appear as both forms and metaphors for growth that unfolds through pressure, fracture, and change. The work carries echoes of family histories—reflections of my grandparents’ stories and my parents’ pain, their migrations, silences, and endurance. Some of these seeds grow within the tensions between cultures, generations, and voices, where identities are shaped by negotiation and distance. Through layered paintings and fragile ceramic forms, I imagine a landscape where these histories continue to germinate, transforming conflict into resilience and possibility. Like a quiet garden of thoughts, Seeds gathers these small beginnings—reminding us that what appears delicate or overlooked can hold the power to grow into something enduring.
Mezzanine Gallery
Eric Chan – Manifest Diaspora
BIO
Eric Chan / 陳志宇 / 진지유 (b. 1988) is an Asian-American visual artist based in Seattle. His artwork features folk art and narrative portraiture with ink line drawing and oil painting on reclaimed wood. Eric was born in Connecticut and raised by a Cantonese father, Korean mother, and Korean-Japanese grandparents. He attended Qingdao University in 2008 and graduated from Vassar College in 2010, where he studied Chinese art, culture, history, and language.
Eric learned to paint from his observations as a life model for studio art classes and became inspired by narrative art and history painting while working at a book publisher as a proofreader of book jackets and cover art. In 2018 he relocated from New York to Seattle, wandering westward for three months in a camper van with his husband Dan. A grandson of Hong Kong immigrants to Seattle’s Chinatown – International District, Chan’s artistic subjects are often rooted in a personal exploration of intergenerational and multicultural themes of diaspora, dissidence, pilgrimage, and pioneers.
ARTIST STATEMENT
From Morro Bay (1587) to Bayou St. Malo (1763), from Astoria (1811) to the California Gold Rush (1848) to Promontory Summit (1869) and Iosepa (1889), the history of Asian and Pacific peoples in North America begins with stolen and exploited laborers in its most physical, dangerous, impermanent, unreliable, and undignified industries (ports, mines, lumberyards, fisheries, farms, factories, shops, and railroads) moving west to east with no clear paths to citizenship, ownership, agency, family, or prosperity, a perpetual foreigner in diametric opposition to the myth of manifest destiny. Our communities’ histories are often forgotten, misremembered, or rewritten over generations and regimes, but they are intertwined inextricably in every facet of this fragile, short-sighted, and ever-shifting culture, state, and society.