WORDS & PHOTO: Nante Santamaria

Four years ago, JAMES JEAN, the Taiwanese-American artist revered for his work with DC Comics and Prada, quit working for The Man. It was in 2009 when he celebrated his outing as a full-time fine artist through Kindling at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, anointing ground for today’s best pop imagists. The venue’s namesake art dealer thought Jean was “unattainable.” His ultra-defined creatures and landscapes blurring the line between digital and hand sketching, his visceral figure renderings, and his abstract strokes of color all make for something deliciously sublime.

Jean, having graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2001 and having mounted wildly successful shows since (Rift in 2010 and Rebus in 2011), thinks he still doesn’t know anything. The man is serious, deliberately pausing as if absorbing the gravity of every word he thought difficult as he contemplated being “in the middle of this politically, socially, culturally complex world.”

Art, being also autobiography, has this as Jean’s word: “an ongoing narrative that I’m still trying to discover. That’s the journey of being an artist; a lot of the stuff is discovering…and maybe neurosis and obsessions that have developed when we were children, and those become haunting…” This, he remembers as a three-year-old boy in Taiwan: the waft of burning incense, its smoke dispersing into delicate, indeterminate matter. He adds, “One thing I cherish is the freedom to live a creative life.”