"A Celebration"
In I Ask of Life (2024-2025), Jamie-May Minjie turns to the everyday as a vessel of transcendence, tracing the delicate tension between the banal and the divine. Across a series of watercolors, Minjie documents the rituals of ordinary existence with a clarity that is almost monastic. Each work suggests that what we call “the everyday” is, in the words of Søren Kierkegaard, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
The series invites viewers to see simplicity not as an aesthetic reduction, but as a form of spiritual inquiry. The soft palette of watercolors holds the impermanence of each moment, it dissolves even as it declares itself. In this sense, the paintings evoke what Arundhati Roy once described as in The God of Small Things, “And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
Minjie’s practice, rooted in the introspection of perennial philosophy, asks a fundamental question: What remains sacred when all else is stripped away? These works are not answers, but doorways, portals into the intimate grammar of life, where sleep, awakening, and dialogue with the divine are all facets of the same luminous breath.
A Celebration (2024) is a contemplative body of work that reflects on the spirit of this era, its turbulence, repetition, and quiet perseverance. Drawing from cycles of personal failure and renewal, the artist charts a familiar yet evolving journey, where past tumorous lows form the very peaks from which new perspectives emerge. The work suggests that beauty is not despite the struggle, but born from it.
In this series, Minjie reflects on a culture that turned inward. Self-love became a tool for unlearning: “We call ourselves ceos (small caps) while running after awakening, breaking that chain of identification, and shaking off the separation to be in the One. We treasure the craft of caring for and loving ourselves until we become so invincibly independent. We bust the guilty trick of embracing pleasure, on a quest to break generational trauma, and on the way to setting ourselves free. We then blur the ‘I’ by removing its capitalization and retreat to where things are decentralized. We document ourselves, publish ourselves, incorporate ourselves, and celebrate ourselves.”
Through a blend of existential inquiry and poetic introspection, the series explores the idea of life not as something actively controlled, but as an unfolding spectacle. The artist proposes that the self exists simultaneously as participant and observer, seated in the "stimulation seat," watching life crash forward like waves against the face. In this view, existence is not a performance we direct, but a prewritten script in which we find ourselves cast. Each misstep and failure, rather than detracting, intensifies the narrative arc of becoming. A Celebration suggests that to live a human life is to be woven into a continuous process: fluid, cinematic, and perpetually unfolding.
https://www.jamiemayminjie.com/
IG: @jamiemayminjie
Medium & dimensions:
Watercolor on hot pressed Satine watercolor paper
Jamie-May Minjie (b. Taipei) is a multifaceted visual and text-based artist and poet. She writes about immigration experiences, modern love, and LGTBQ+ topics. Her watercolor practice, initiated as a therapeutic practice to process pain and heal depression, is an embodiment of an emotional landscape that mimics the topography as well as the mountains and water traditional Chinese ink painting. She holds an MA from UCL and has appeared in several publications across the U.S, including Barzakh Magazine, CLIP, and Hobart.
