Chintia Kirana’s work moves between fragility and endurance, ritual and reconstruction. Rooted in the quiet complexity of memory, identity, and time, her multidisciplinary practice spans installation, painting, drawing, and works on paper. Her materials—eggshells, ashes from burned joss paper, carbon residue, clay, and cyanotype—are gathered through acts of nourishment, ceremony, and daily living. These fragments are not merely symbolic. They are temporal archives of what has been consumed, remembered, burned, or quietly set aside.
Her process is one of slowness and repetition, shaped by gestures of care. Whether through the layering of delicate surfaces or the subtle disruption of form, Kirana’s work reveals tension between presence and absence, opacity and exposure, what is said and what is withheld. Her compositions often operate as thresholds—not resolutions, but spaces of pause and reflection.
Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, and raised in the American South, Kirana carries the perspective of a Third Culture individual, shaped by displacement and diaspora. The 1998 riots in Indonesia, though not directly depicted in her work, continue to inform her interest in silence, inherited trauma, and the aesthetics of restraint. Rather than illustrate violence, her works suggest what lingers in its aftermath: brokenness, beauty, and survival. She draws upon both Buddhist contemplation and Christian introspection, blending traditional Chinese ritual practices with the visual languages of minimalism, conceptualism, and abstraction. Light and shadow—once used as tools of illusion in her early work—now function as structural elements, expanding and collapsing space to create conditions for inward looking.
