Alan Chin: Palimpsests
May 9 – June 20, 2026
Alan Chin: Palimpsests
May 9 – June 20, 2026
Curated by Sophia Quach McCabe, Ph.D.
Location
AMPHI, 49 W. Del Mar Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91105
Gallery Hours
Wednesday to Saturday, 12 am – 5 pm
Contact
1(626)831-9988
AMPHI Gallery is pleased to announce Alan Chin: Palimpsests by Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Alan Chin.
Alan Chin: Palimpsests presents a new series of paintings and ceramic sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Alan Chin, along with his diverse, interdisciplinary practice and multi-layered approach to artmaking over the last 20 years. Chin’s mantra, “We are on the shoulders of giants,” acknowledges his familial and artistic lineages and legacies, including those who supported his artistic formation. These lineages and diverse layers appear like a palimpsest in Chin’s works, welcoming us into his artistic formation and continuing journey.
Chin’s latest painting series, Red Envelopes, gestures to the Chinese ritual of intergenerational gifting of “hongbao” (red envelopes) filled with lucky money. The monumental red envelope canvases with their palimpsests of abstraction, honors Chin’s elders and chosen families.
Ingrained in Chin’s practice is also his respect and care for the natural world, especially bonsai. This exhibition marks the debut of Chin’s monumental ceramic bonsai and Palimpsests of Nature series, a wonderland of imagined nature in greens, pinks, blues, and blacks. Chin’s interest in nature includes how its patterns serve as records of time, exemplified in the circular growth rings of trees—transformed by Chin’s hands into spiral pinch pot ceramics such as Blue Ridge (2023)—and how their kinetic structures adapt to different environments and speak to an ongoing story of survival, as offered by the artist’s tenmoku-glazed reimagined bonsai sculpture Ahu (2025).
The journey of personal memories and ritual practice through artmaking is also shared by Chin’s Light Paintings and Throne series. Abstract patterns within the luxurious silky black-colored Light Paintings become visible to the eye only when viewed from various angles. In his yellow Throne series, Chin married painting and sculpture using Belgian linen and the humble potter’s wheel, collapsing the chasm between the two disciplines. Working across mediums, Chin layers his ceramic vases, vessels, and sculptures with cultural meaning. Using wood-fired kilns to create tenmoku-glazed stoneware bowls and vases in deep blacks and iron reds, Chin connects his ceramics to those of Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) China. Similarly, the porcelain and stoneware Jade Sippers echo Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) stem cups.
Alan Chin: Palimpsests is curated by Sophia Quach McCabe, Ph.D.
About the Artist
Alan Chin (b. 1987, Berkeley, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist who uses material process to explore how meaning is shaped through everyday forms and actions. Working across sculpture, painting, installation, performance, and film, Chin examines systems, repetition, and transformation as ways to consider labor, perception, and social experience. His projects often engage the tension between structure and instability, revealing how objects carry cultural, emotional, and historical significance through use and time.
Chin received his BFA in Ceramics and Painting from California College of the Arts in 2011, with additional study at Academie Minerva in the Netherlands. He has exhibited internationally, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, The Kaneko, Resché Ateliér in Paris, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and represented the United States at the 2017 International Sculpture Biennale in Wuhan, China. Chin lives and works in Los Angeles.