Sep 20, 2025 to Jan 11, 2026
Kejie Lin: A Garden of My Own
About the Exhibition
A border of purple and white pansies carpets the edge of a lush garden. Coneflowers, heavy with rain, nod in the breeze. Nearby, a single, perfect circle is cut from a hosta leaf — a tiny doorway left by a fat bumblebee dusted with pollen. This is Kejie Lin’s backyard: her subject and her studio.
What does it mean to live with a garden? For Lin, the answer lies in a daily practice of observation and care. Her background as a landscape architect, along with the experience of immigrating to Canada in her late forties, give her work a rare fluency. This dual experience allows Lin to approach the natural world from multiple vantage points, both scientific and intuitive. The garden becomes a layered living medium where a translated homeland and a transplanted identity take root.
In Lin’s artistic practice, the choice of medium is as significant as the subject. The intricate art of Chinese ink painting (gongbi 工笔) carries centuries of rules, lineage, and philosophy. The term gongbi itself translates to “meticulous brush,” a realist style demanding precise, controlled brushstrokes and careful delineation of form. Unlike more spontaneous ink wash styles, it is a slow, disciplined process. By applying this classical visual language to the specific flora of her Canadian garden, Lin creates a powerful hybrid aesthetic. While Chinese tradition often favours symbolic plants like the chrysanthemum or plum blossom, Lin turns her meticulous brush to the subjects outside her own door. Lin’s work does more than render botanical life in exquisite detail. Her paintings and installations treat the garden as a living medium, a space where landscapes of memory and presence converge.
In a culture that prizes fleeting speed and easy disposability, each painting, born from a slow act of devotion, becomes a gentle defiance. A garden is not a simple gift of nature; it is a world earned in partnership with it. It asks for our patience. It invites us to dwell, to contemplate, and to see the universe in a single leaf.
About the Artist
Kejie Lin 林可婕 (Richmond Hill, ON) is a first-generation Chinese artist. Her paintings use traditional Chinese painting materials as medium, with a focus on the meticulous technique of traditional Chinese Gongbi painting, featuring floral, birds and landscape themes as the main subjects. With 20 years of experience as a landscape designer and an experienced landscape photographer, Kejie has accumulated a wealth of materials for her artwork and draws inspiration from her photographs. Kejie constantly explores and practices new forms of artistic expressions and painting techniques based on the foundation of traditional Chinese gongbi (工笔) painting. Kejie expresses her thoughts, emotions, and reflections on reality in her works, forming her unique artistic style.
