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Jason Chu
USA
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"After creating others' visions, it's time I built my own."
Jason Chu is a Los Angeles-based painter whose practice has been shaped by a biography so uncommonly varied that it reads less like a career trajectory and more like a sustained negotiation between competing forms of physical and creative intelligence. Born in Los Angeles in 1988 to a Chinese-Burmese immigrant father and an American mother, Chu grew up navigating the space between different worlds, different cultural inheritances, and different understandings of what discipline, identity, and commitment actually require of a person. That experience of existing between things, never entirely contained within a single category, became the foundational condition of both his life and his art.
Illusions | Acrylic
$2,800
36 x 36
This work reflects on the notion of relationship. The yin and yang of thoughts, actions, and reality. As one shifts the other is surely creating a new space.
The darkness is textured heavily, much like its enlightened counterpart. When we get closer, they meet with a smooth finished understanding. Get deeper, and we have intertwined new space, that will inevitably create its own path.
Movement was the first language Chu mastered with any real fluency. Introduced to gymnastics at the age of four, he trained with a seriousness and duration that most athletes never sustain, eventually earning a place on the U.S. Junior National Team and continuing as a collegiate competitor at Penn State University. The sport gave him something that extended far beyond physical capability: an understanding of rhythm, structure, precision, and controlled chaos as forces that could be inhabited rather than merely observed. Gymnastics taught him that the body under rigorous discipline becomes a thinking instrument, capable of translating internal states into external form with a precision that language rarely achieves.
Aqua Vida | Acrylic
$2,500
30 x 40
Im a Pisces, so naturally I have really gravitated towards the water. Almost any form of it really. From being the captain of a sailboat I own with an artist and great friend of mine, to surfing in Malibu almost every week. Water is life.
This is a reflection of just that.
Art existed alongside that athletic life quietly and persistently, refusing to disappear even when circumstances made it easy to ignore. At St. John Bosco, a high school art program opened Chu's awareness to the possibility that creative expression could carry genuine weight, that visual work was not decoration but a form of thinking with its own specific power. When he arrived at Penn State, he initially enrolled in business studies before the pull toward art and design became too strong to reroute. He changed course, found himself increasingly absorbed by questions of expression, composition, and the emotional architecture that serious visual work could hold, and was building real momentum when a series of injuries and life shifts forced a reckoning with who he was beyond the identity of athlete.
"Repetition in painting is not tedium; it is how truth accumulates."
Dropping out of college was not a surrender but a redirection whose full implications would take years to understand. What followed was a period of genuine reinvention conducted across an unusually wide range of experiences. Chu became a snowboarding instructor, performed as an acrobat and dancer with Cirque du Soleil's Beatles Love Show in Las Vegas, dealt poker professionally, and eventually returned to Los Angeles where he built a career as a Hollywood stunt performer. For nearly fifteen years he worked on major film productions, inhabiting fictional worlds constructed from movement, cinematography, sound, and narrative intention. Through all of it, painting remained present as an undercurrent, never fully suppressed, waiting for the conditions that would allow it to surface as the primary practice it had always been becoming.
Cubed | Acrylic
$3,000
36 x 36
Throughout my own discovery of self, I’ve gravitated toward texture, color and the juxtaposition of such, gradients, geometry, and now monochromatic minimalism.
This work demonstrates texture & minimalism, including being monochrome, really accentuates its simplicity. Take a ride along the lanes of repetition, and you will find hard work, free hand, and intentional strokes toward meaning.
Diving deeper into minimalistic expression, this work focuses heavily on texture. For me there is a never ending representation through the amount of just paint on canvas, not just the colors, theme or even illustration.
The sharpness created by the lines, one textured geometric rectangle one top of another, with a different approach at texture. When aligned in the right spaces, it can really open up the perception of minimal design.
Above & Below | Acrylic
$2,200
36 x 36
The return to painting as a central creative commitment came around 2021, arriving not as a sudden decision but as the recognition of a need that had been accumulating for years. Stunt work had provided a genuine and demanding creative outlet, but one that operated within defined parameters and in service of other people's visions. What Chu found himself reaching toward was a more complete form of authorship, something that could accommodate the full range of what he had learned and felt and understood across decades of physical, professional, and personal experience. Painting offered that completeness in a way nothing else had.
"Growing up between a Chinese-Burmese father and an American mother meant I never fully belonged to one world, and that distance became my visual instinct."
"There is a specific kind of knowledge that only comes from doing something with your body for twenty years. Gymnastics gave me that. Not flexibility or strength, but the understanding that precision is built through repetition that most people abandon too early. When I returned to painting seriously, I brought that same relationship to process with me. A composition does not reveal itself quickly. You have to stay with it through the stages where it looks wrong, where every instinct tells you to stop, and keep working until the surface tells you something you did not already know going in. That is not talent. That is the discipline the sport installed in me before art had the chance to."
The intellectual and aesthetic foundations of Chu's painting practice draw from a set of influences that reflect the breadth of his curiosity as much as the specificity of his visual commitments. Bauhaus principles, geometric abstraction, minimalism, and modernist architecture all inform the structural logic of his work. Artists and thinkers including Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oscar Niemeyer, and Kengo Kuma function as reference points, as do the restrained philosophical traditions of Korean monochromatic minimalism and Dansaekhwa. Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon also hold a place in this constellation, reminding Chu that formal discipline and psychological intensity are not opposed but can coexist within a single visual language.
Intersection | Acrylic
$1,000
20 x 20
With just as much intention, these smaller works have their own dialogue. Intersection has taken notions from works previous to it, and furthered the evolution.
My work with gradients contained in these boarders,or boundaries, explored a new life with breaking these rules. This was one of the first works I started using these thin bars of color as well.
Repetition, symmetry, texture, and the spatial relationships between compositional elements are not merely formal concerns within Chu's work but emotional and psychological ones. He approaches abstraction not as a retreat from meaning but as a method of creating conditions in which meaning can be encountered on the viewer's own terms. The intention is never to deliver a pre-formed conclusion but to construct a space in which internal dialogue becomes possible, where the viewer is drawn inward rather than instructed outward. Negative space functions in his compositions not as absence but as active pressure, shaping the weight and direction of everything surrounding it.
JHE | Acrylic
$2,500
30 x 40
JHE was an inspiration from the great Jimmy Hendrix. A lover of music and vinyl, I was blasting a collection of his tunes while creating this piece.
This was an earlier work that has greatly influenced my “alla prima” application. Alla Prima is a technique implying all work is done while the painting is wet, aka “first attempt.”
The physicality that defined Chu's earliest sense of himself continues to operate within his painting practice, though transformed into different registers of expression. Gesture, layering, and the endurance required by sustained repetition all carry traces of the athletic discipline that shaped his relationship to the body and to effort. The tension between movement and stillness that gymnastics made visceral now manifests in compositions that hold both forces simultaneously, surfaces that appear controlled and considered while carrying evidence of the energy required to reach that resolution. Every piece, in Chu's understanding of his own process, is simultaneously an act of construction and an act of excavation.
Along those lines of boarder breaking came a work with a different view. Within these smaller symmetrical works comes endless possibilities with dialogue.
Ive worked with splatter a lot in previous works, that I haven’t explored again for quite some time. With this presentation, layering a single minimal splat amongst its boundary breaking, bar intersecting counterparts was ideal to balance the composition.
The Window | Acrylic
$1,000
20 x 20
"Negative space is not empty; it is where meaning breathes."
Keep it Golden | Acrylic
$2,400
30 x 40
Along with my work in gradients and texture, I can’t get enough symmetry into my work. In this case I was eager to introduce some sacred geometry into this piece.
The golden ratio is one of the universes most fundamental principles. Just as this lesson stretches infinitely, so too are the possibilities to grow like the sun, evolve like space, and expand like the universe.
The multicultural identity Chu carries, shaped by the intersection of Chinese-Burmese and American experience, informs not just the themes his work approaches but the perceptual sensibility it operates from. Having spent a life navigating between categories, disciplines, and cultural frameworks, he brings to abstraction an intuitive understanding of how boundaries function and how meaning shifts when those boundaries are questioned. His interest in how familiar visual structures can be made to feel newly uncertain, how repetition can produce both comfort and disorientation depending on the viewer's relationship to it, reflects a lifetime of existing at the intersection of things rather than securely within any single one.
Another installation into smaller work with a powerful outcome. Stepping deeper into versions of “alla prima,” in this case with brush strokes instead of with a pallet knife.
After starting, to whatever degree, a gradient, I then use the brush with one very intentional stroke after the next, to create a layered and depth filled experience.
CC Streams | Acrylic
$1,000
20 x 20
What Chu is ultimately building through his painting practice is a body of work capable of carrying the full weight of a life in which discipline, risk, reinvention, and the pursuit of genuine expression have all played essential and non-negotiable roles. The work does not illustrate biography but it is inseparable from it, holding within its formal structures the accumulated understanding of someone who has inhabited the body seriously, observed the world carefully, and arrived at painting as the discipline most capable of transforming that accumulated experience into something another person can stand in front of and genuinely feel. The pursuit at the center of his practice, translating the intangible into form with honesty, intention, and presence, is one he considers ongoing, unfinished, and worth every demanding hour it requires.
Range of Emotions |Acrylic
$2,600
36 x 36
The very first of this new process I have gone down the path of. As explained earlier “alla prima” is the act of working while wet, or first attempt.
This way of working with color, and the juxtaposition of it, creates such an undiscovered dialogue that I must bring out only after starting. The process does not only come with some anxiety of not knowing the finished product, but also the extreme ecstasy of allowing the work to then finish itself.
"Life kept resetting me until painting became the only constant."
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