Hi, i'm nen ♥
Nen Chang is an illustrator and painter working in comics, gaming, and fine art.
Nen’s intermittent Cotard’s Delusion generally leads her to juxtapose the erotic and the grotesque. She dresses objectively horrific concepts in beautiful detail and surreal imagery to coax the viewer past the revulsion one might experience when encountering a corpse or instance of mortal physical trauma, altering how one might approach the uncanny or the sublime. Nen invites the viewer to trespass into an experience where one might understand a little of what it means to suffer, die, and then continue to function. Nen pulls an unspoken vision of the human condition from the fluidity of water, the subtlety of second glances, and her ability to pair painstaking attention to detail with the freedom of frenzied motion.
Currently, Nen works as a promotional illustrator, broadcast personality, and lecturer. She has painted for titles such as Dishonoured, Dark Souls, Jessica Jones, Captain America, Legend of the Five Rings, and Shinobi Clans and clients such as Marvel, DC, Valiant, Titan, and many others. Her characters are uniquely charismatic and her figures twist and twine in rare and unseemly ways.
Nen may be a painter and a designer, but her talent lies in making characters breathe.
For a long time, I've been caught between two people.
There's the external self, the person who puts on the face that people prefer to see, that people need to see. I smile when appropriate. I say what is necessary. I feign any number of things: apathy, pity, adulation, pathos. It is done with purpose. The mask is a pleasant facade that cloaks survival instinct with pleasantries and deference.
The second self, the internal self, is the self that hides behind the veil, that uses the toughened hide of the external girl as a smokescreen. Through the facade, she observes. She analyzes. She remembers. The secret girl is dark, always wary, never without her guard.
What I pull from the water is the dual nature of these selves, to contrast the beautiful and surreal with the violent and grotesque. Sometimes the contrast is subtle, otherworldly beauties that seem somehow unsettling, dark and predatory despite their doe eyes. Other times, the contrast is extreme, inflicting physical trauma on my figures to illustrate the emotional and mental anguish they have endured. But always, through use of brilliant colour and twisting bodies, the freedom and frenzied motion of watercolor draped and tempered by the richness of oil, they are paintings of two people held captive in a single figure.
