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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
Opposing forms exist in constant relationship, each shaping the other through contrast and proximity. Illusions explores the shifting space between perception and reality, where boundaries dissolve and new understanding emerges.
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
Inspired by movement, transformation, and renewal, Aqua Vida reflects the fluid nature of life. Through layered color and depth, the work captures a sense of motion that is both energetic and meditative.
Repetition in painting is not tedium; it is how truth accumulates."
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.
Cubed | Acrylic
$3,000
36 x 36
Cubed explores repetition as a form of discovery. Through texture, structure, and restraint, subtle variations emerge, revealing the quiet complexity hidden within disciplined process.
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.
Above & Below investigates the relationship between structure and space. Layered geometric forms create a dialogue between depth, texture, and perception, inviting closer observation.
Above & Below | Acrylic
$2,200
36 x 36
"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."
Intersection | Acrylic
$1,000
20 x 20
A study in transition and evolution, Intersection examines the moment where established structures begin to break apart, creating new pathways and possibilities.
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.
JHE | Acrylic
$2,500
30 x 40
Inspired by improvisation and rhythm, JHE embraces spontaneity within structure. Created alla prima, the work preserves the energy and movement present in its making.
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.
The Window explores the tension between order and disruption. Boundaries are established, challenged, and redefined, encouraging viewers to look beyond the visible framework.
The Window | Acrylic
$1,000
20 x 20
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.
"Negative space is not empty; it is where meaning breathes."
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.
CC Streams | Acrylic
$1,000
20 x 20
Built through deliberate layers of gesture and color, CC Streams balances precision and flow. Each mark contributes to a surface shaped by movement, repetition, and time.
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.
Referencing principles of harmony and proportion, Keep It Golden explores the timeless relationship between structure, balance, and growth through geometric abstraction.
Keep it Golden | Acrylic
$2,400
30 x 40
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
Created through an intuitive alla prima process, Range of Emotions embraces uncertainty and discovery. Color and gesture interact freely, reflecting the complexity of emotional experience.
"Life kept resetting me until painting became the only constant."
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