Painting & Writing
In I Ask of Life (2024-2025), Jamie-May Minjie turns to the everyday as a vessel of transcendence, tracing the delicate tension between the banal and the divine. Across a series of watercolors, Minjie documents the rituals of ordinary existence with a clarity that is almost monastic. Each work suggests that what we call “the everyday” is, in the words of Søren Kierkegaard, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
The series invites viewers to see simplicity not as an aesthetic reduction, but as a form of spiritual inquiry. The soft palette of watercolors holds the impermanence of each moment, it dissolves even as it declares itself. In this sense, the paintings evoke what Arundhati Roy once described as in The God of Small Things, “And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
Minjie’s practice, rooted in the introspection of perennial philosophy, asks a fundamental question: What remains sacred when all else is stripped away? These works are not answers, but doorways, portals into the intimate grammar of life, where sleep, awakening, and dialogue with the divine are all facets of the same luminous breath.
