Having studied Chinese painting under Pan Tianshou and Lu Yanshao, Chen Jialing specialized in landscape painting and calligraphy. Since the 1980s, Chen has been exploring ways to fuse together ancient Chinese mural painting and European watercolor. From this experimental stage, he developed a distinctive style marked by his use of faded, light layers of ink and meticulous lines.

In Untitled, Chen Jialing’s work becomes more abstract as he attempts to capture the beauty of nature and the richness of its colors. He draws allusions to classical Chinese genre paintings in his works by adapting similar techniques such as forgoing the illusion of depth and depicting popular genre subjects such as flowers and birds. Moreover, by adopting the hand scroll format to nostalgically allude to the past, Chen Jialing perhaps, is paying homage for the times of the literati when genre paintings flourished and when there existed a great communal sense of poetic appreciation for nature.