Known for his fantastical paintings of hybrid flora and fauna, Jon Ching channels the otherworldly in vibrant and meticulously detailed canvases. His precise renderings of regal creatures conjure elemental energies like fire and water, merged with the personalities of mammals, birds, and marine life. Inspired by his island upbringing on O’ahu, Hawai’i, Ching continues to turn to nature as a boundless source of wonder and solace.
The Los Angeles-based artist’s forthcoming solo exhibition, Path of Least Resistance at KP Projects, highlights recent portraits of owls, hummingbirds, fish, orchids, and more. Navigating both the socio-political realities of the past few years and the daily challenges and rewards of parenthood and partnership, Ching invokes symbolic tributes to power and resilience. He highlights a sense of mutual cooperation, paired with a kind of fullness and vigor that mirrors hope and determination.
Ching worked relatively intuitively for this new collection, allowing preliminary sketches to sometimes turn into completely different compositions. “There were pieces that I worked on and tried to force to be one thing, only for them to define themselves as another. And there were pieces that seemed to float down from the muses and land neatly at the end of my brush,” he says in a statement.
Characteristics of the earth take on symbolic qualities in Ching’s paintings, such as rocks that evoke stability and endurance. “Water, both a force of opposition and support, serves as wisdom to find ways around obstacles to get past them, following the path of least resistance when needed,” the gallery says, referencing the origin of the show’s title.
The different stages of the common dandelion, for instance, represent the passage of time through a tender rendering of a lioness with her cubs in “Dandilion.” And in “Thin Air,” a floral-headed cockatoo grips a wisp of smoke in a nod to nature’s transience—and the effects of human-induced habitat loss. There is also a spiritual element to the paradoxically flaming shark in “Force of Nature” and the third eye of the lynx in “Ajna’s Path in Bloom,” which references the eponymous sixth chakra of the body according to Hindu yogic philosophy.
“Path of Least Resistance, is a reflection of the artist’s inner world and personal life,” says a gallery statement. “At a moment when the demands of every day have become increasingly consuming, Ching has found himself distilling larger ideas into simpler and purer form, allowing the work to emerge from more personal experiences, emotions, and small moments that define his present state of mind.”
The artist also examines crucial social issues, like in his nod to George Orwell’s seminal book 1984 in a painting of the same name. Eyes peer out from the center of tropical flowers, reflecting one of the dystopian novel’s main themes of nonstop, ubiquitous surveillance. We can infer the artist’s response to current concerns over privacy in an era where cameras have proliferated—Flock license plate readers, doorbell cameras, CCTV on sidewalks and in parking lots—but there is also another way of looking at Ching’s “1984”: nature knows all.
Path of Least Resistance opens on October 3 and continues through November 7 in Los Angeles. See more on Ching’s Instagram.
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