The Artist Statement - as written by another

My friend Jason is unusually (not unusual for him, but unusual for people) adept at writing descriptions of my work. I've not seriously submitted these synopses as an artist statement to galleries, but I do think they deserve recognition.

I asked him if I could put them up here, and he agreed. He could make a killing on writing press releases for galleries!

The first one, from 2007:

Chan's portraits are bereft of the usual plethora of props and environmental fluff that infects less focused artists' work. Her subjects inhabit this vacuum as though they have been plucked out of their lives and frozen in time. Strangely, rather than leave the subjects deflated and breathless, this *negative* space of sorts only serves to intensify them, as though the air so extracted has been blown into their personalities.

And a recent one, for 2009:

The announcement that Nancy Chan will be showing new work at a show called Spaces reaffirms her bipolar relationship with the concept of enclosure. From a distance, the isolated elements of intricate black within an ocean of white force an obsession on the microcosm, like the huge badge your cool friend had in school that said "piss off" in 1 point text. Up close though, the figures inflate to provide a spatial universe of their own, as though the viewer was drawn through the singularity to live in their world.