J.C.AutoDraw
BIOGRAPHY
The line moves before intention arrives.
In automatic drawing, the hand traces what the body already knows — impulses that precede language, that precede the clear boundary between self and world. J.C. AutoDraw's practice begins at this threshold: where mark-making is neither purely controlled nor purely released, but held in the tension between the two.
Growing up within a Taiwanese visual tradition, the line carried a particular inheritance. Calligraphy is not decoration; it is a form of thinking through the body. Each stroke holds a specific quality of attention — a way of being present to what the hand does. This inheritance is not worn as reference but absorbed as method: the capacity to make a mark that is simultaneously structural and alive.
The ongoing series Self Merging (2024–) proceeds from a simple but inexhaustible question: where does the body end? Not anatomically, but perceptually — in the moment when sensation fades into uncertainty, when the edge of the self becomes indistinct. The paintings do not resolve this question. They are built from the act of holding it open.
Working in oil on canvas, each work positions the body as a site of convergence: instinctive calligraphic line and structural painterly construction meeting within a disciplined spatial framework. Repetition across the series is not redundancy — it is a form of deepening. Each painting inherits a continuity of visual syntax from the last, while advancing the language into less certain territory.
The practice resists resolution. Accumulation replaces conclusion. In this, the work reflects something about consciousness itself: not a fixed condition, but an ongoing process — always in the act of forming and reforming its edges.
Selected exhibitions
Tokyo International Art Fair, Tokyo, 2025
Parallax Art Fair, London, 2019
RSA Open Exhibition, Edinburgh, 2017
Signet Library, Edinburgh, 2016