Satchel Projects is pleased to present Strange Twin, an exhibition of recent paintings by Cynthia Lin, on view from September 11 through October 11, 2025. There will be an opening reception for the artist from 6–8PM on Thursday, September 11.

The works in Strange Twin literally and metaphorically upend the conventions of representational landscape painting. The horizontal landscape is reoriented, disrupting conventional reading and opening it up to new associations and interpretations. Color is likewise uncoupled from the found palette, subverting traditional “push-pull” formalism and creating a flickering optical buzz.

Imagery is sourced from Lin’s experiences in nature, specifically the places along a lake’s edge where land and water meet. These are dynamic sites, where trees have overturned, exposing root systems, and where organisms are in the process of growing or dying. In these areas of interplay and collision, biological and visual systems interact and double, mirrored by the water’s surface. Turned vertically, this mirroring creates a bilateral symmetry, suggesting figures -- insects, aliens, totems; or biology -- body, brain, circulatory systems. In Lin’s words,

These uncanny symmetries become Rorschach tests. Ambiguous and contradictory, they seem both vulnerable and invincible, so are they harmful or helpful?  Natural/ artificial/ fecund/ toxic?  The figure/ spirit is split between solid and liquid, the known and its altered mirror, the conscious and unconscious.   

This reorientation of the landscape evolved out of an earlier series of paintings based on topographical maps of planets. Lin understood that conventions of compass points, north-and-south equaling up-and-down, are an arbitrary human invention, with hemispherical designations established by a person in authority. Looking down on a map freed Lin to rotate the landscape, leading to the reconsideration of pictorial convention in the current work.

Identity plays a role as well, via the sense of dislocation, seeing something from the “wrong” angle, seeing things differently, being misunderstood. These paintings, in the artist’s words, are “informed by an Asian-American immigrant’s experience of dislocation, misunderstanding, and adaptation.”  The work “presents an outsider’s freely shifting point of view, nourished by the wondrous and cyclical natural world.”

The paintings in Strange Twin invite slow looking and sustained contemplation in an era of hyper-accelerated image consumption. As their richness and density unfold for the viewer, dissonance and consonance are given a place to coexist.

Cynthia Lin is a painter living and working in New York City. Born in Taiwan, Lin grew up in Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn. Lin is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and recognition as a Finalist from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at DeCordova Museum, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, The National Academy of Design, Drawing Center, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Michael Steinberg Gallery, and Pierogi Gallery. Collections include Minneapolis Institute of Art and Dallas Museum of Art. She has attended residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Dora Maar House, the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome, and Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus II in Schwandorf, Germany, among others. She earned her BA from University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from The University of Iowa. Lin currently teaches at Purchase College, State University of New York, as Associate Professor of Painting + Drawing.