For Jamie-May Minjie, painting is a disciplined form of attention: a meditative apparatus in which memory, language, and pictorial thought convene. Her studio practice extends the diarist’s habit as sheets of notebooks answering fields of pigment, and the act of making becomes a way of thinking-with images. Each painting is a window that invites her mind to drift into the cityscape, staging a return in which topography and affect recombine to pose questions about who one once was. The paintings are not archives in the archival sense; they are enacted encounters, rooms of return where the present posture of looking reanimates earlier temporalities.

This preview at Saratoga Library presents four paintings drawn from that labor: East River Sunset, Notting Hill, Manhattan Bridge from Williamsburg, and Manly Beach. Each is a node in a larger cartography of becoming, places that recurred in Minjie’s journals and for which she claims particular indebtedness. In execution the works operate like windows through which the mind travels: the brush opens an aperture and Minjie’s attention migrates into each corner of the city, recollecting the way light pooled on a coffee table, how a bridge summoned a particular loneliness, how a shoreline calibrated longing. The pictorial fields hold palimpsestic marks and erased gestures; layers accumulate like annotated pages, and the image functions simultaneously as tableau and repository for affective detail. What is represented is not merely topography but the felt architecture of memory itself.

A Celebration (2024) was created during a transitional year in Taipei, when the artist had returned from California and took a break from her professional trajectory. While working full-time as a program manager, she painted in the margins of her day. In Taipei’s humid quiet, she reconsidered what it means to build a life of meaning, care, and autonomy.

Read against longer histories of modern and contemporary painting, Minjie’s practice participates in conversations about place as psychic terrain. Her surfaces owe something to modernism’s phenomenological interiors, the attempt to render perception as lived time, while also aligning with contemporary projects that map migration, urban unconscious, and the ethics of remembering. In the present cultural moment, when algorithmic systems promise exhaustive capture and recall, these paintings insist on a contrary labor: slow attention, interpretive failure, and the irreplaceable opacity of human recollection. Made in 2025, the series resists the totalizing tendencies of data-driven memory by privileging nuance, hesitation, and the particular cadence of a remembered street. Painting, here, is both method and argument: a way to contend with how we keep what matters and how we let the rest go.

Minjie frames her younger self not as an object of critique but as a formative interlocutor, the teacher of persistence, tenderness and the difficult grammar of survival. The works in this preview invite us into those classrooms: to sit with images that document and transform the past, to feel how a single scene can fold into an eternity, and to remember that it is often our past selves who remind us who we can still become.

Inquiry

For inquiries or commissions, please feel free to email me at her@jamiemayminjie.com.

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To My Younger Self (2025)

Notting Hill (2025)

To My Younger Self series
Acrylic on canvas.

Manhattan Bridge from Williamsburg. (2025)

To My Younger Self series
Acrylic on canvas.

Manly Beach (2025)

To My Younger Self series
Acrylic on canvas.

East River Sunset (2024)

To My Younger Self series
Acrylic on canvas.

I ask of life (2024-2025)

Duologue with the supreme (2025)

I ask of life. series
Watercolor on SATINE hot pressed watercolor paper.
Size: 18” x 18”

Deeply Asleep (2025)

I ask of life. series
Watercolor on SATINE hot pressed watercolor paper.
Size: 18” x 18”

Inquiry

For inquiries or commissions, please feel free to email me at her@jamiemayminjie.com.

You can view the full catalog by clicking the button below. Please use password:
patron

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