Asher Liftin, Brooklyn Bridge, 2026. Acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 218.4 x 167.6 cm. © Asher Liftin, courtesy Pace Gallery.
Xuteng Chén, Defiance, 2025. Oil on canvas, 40 × 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Danny Sober, pair, 2025. Oil on canvas, 40 × 30 cm. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery.
Judith Eisler, AK, 2019. Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Some images are chosen immediately; others stay around for years before becoming paintings. They might come from a film, a personal photograph, or an internet search. What catches an artist’s attention can be difficult to explain, and the reason for returning to an image may become clearer—or change—in the course of working with it.
For Xuteng Chén, Judith Eisler, Asher Liftin and Danny Sobor, those images enter the studio with traces already attached: movement, screen brightness, distortions, fragments of context. Some qualities are retained; others change through colour, marks, scale and surface. Intentions change too. A method produces an unexpected result. A familiar subject resists understanding. An earlier attempt becomes a painting that needs to be tried again.
We began by asking these four artists about the images they paint: where they find them, what makes them stay, and what happens when they remake them by hand. Their answers gradually became accounts of a longer relationship—with painting itself, and with the experiences they return to through it.
That relationship takes shape through particular habits. Photographs accumulate. A canvas is turned upside down so that a face can be seen again as colour and form. An image is revisited after an unsuccessful attempt, its possibilities still unexhausted. Through these actions, painting becomes a way of working through what has caught their attention, including things they cannot yet explain.
What is kept may change in the keeping. What seemed familiar may become strange. Some things acquire a form; others remain just out of reach. The attachment persists through the act of returning—to an image, to a surface, to something still to be worked out. Whatever understanding emerges belongs to these encounters, while the desire to continue may need no explanation. Painting chose them.
Edited from separate interviews, the following four accounts trace those unfinished encounters in the artists’ own words.
Xuteng Chén, Paring, 2026. Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Xuteng Chén, Mid-Breath, 2025. Oil on canvas, 40 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Xuteng Chén: When it comes to my approach to painting, I have always felt that I am not someone with a particularly rich imagination or a strong sense of creativity. I prefer a sense of stability, both in my work and in my life. I am drawn to things that have settled over time, and to results that have stood the test of time. In that sense, what I seek in painting is quite simple: to be able to keep painting.
I usually collect a lot of images over time. Blurry images tend to attract me, because their indistinct boundaries create space for my way of painting. I am also drawn to objects with a full, substantial form. They can bring a certain tension to the composition. And then there is light. Light is abstract, which makes finding ways to represent it particularly interesting.
In 2023, I began experimenting with portraiture. The first portrait I painted was of a boy from the Muktinath Valley in Nepal. His skin was rough and reddish from exposure to the high-altitude environment. I felt that these particular qualities would produce an interesting result when combined with my painting technique.
I return to still lifes and children not because I have found a fixed way of representing them, but because there are always aspects that cannot be fully understood at once. Still lifes are usually quiet and static. They seem to have nothing to tell us, yet subtle changes in form, light and colour can convey a certain feeling. For me, they are not simply objects to be depicted; they also hold feelings within everyday life that are easily overlooked. As for children, their expressions, gestures and gazes can sometimes create a sense of intimacy, while at other times they leave us with an inexplicable sense of distance.
I am not trying to restore the image to greater clarity. Instead, I want the painting to make its blurriness, fragmentation and incompleteness tangible, turning it into something that can be looked at, felt and understood in new ways.
An image often captures a scene in an instant, whereas painting requires repeated acts of observation, selection and depiction. For me, perhaps the most important thing about painting is that it can transform an image from something we simply look at into an experience that can be felt and thought about over time.
Judith Eisler, Toni Basil, 2020. Oil on canvas, 100 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Judith Eisler, Hanna, 2019. Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Judith Eisler: One day, while watching George Lucas’ 1971 sci-fi film THX 1138, I noticed a rat dart quickly across the screen. I wondered “what was that?” and paused the film to take photographs. When I painted one of the images, I realized that although I clearly saw a rat, viewers interpreted the subject in different ways. This opened up an interest in the image as something unstable and in flux, where ambiguity creates a space for possibility and disruption.
I moved away from using nature photography as a source when I began taking photographs of films. I was no longer interested in painting images that felt so precisely resolved. The blur produced by movement and speed offered more expressive and abstract possibilities. I became drawn to slippage that occurs between actions, to moments when an image seems to resist settling into fixed form. By painting these fleeting formal shifts, I could locate a sense of presence in what remains unresolved.
I try to let go of what I think something should be and see what it actually is. Rather than focusing on particular features of a face, I want to understand the overall structure of the image—the sum of its parts. When I turn the canvas upside down or sideways, I set aside my assumptions and focus on abstract elements such as direction, color and form. When I turn it back, there is a kind of vibration between recognition and abstraction, between what the image was and what it is becoming. The subject becomes both tangible and atmospheric, holding a tension between what we recognize and what we sense.
Painting activates qualities inherent in an image, transforming its flatness into atmosphere, texture, color and light. It allows time to expand and shift within the frame and holds our sense of depth and perception in suspension. Through the act of looking, something not immediately visible gradually emerges. A painting is not only about what we see, but also about how we experience and feel what we see.
Asher Liftin: Recent Work, 395 Broadway, New York, NY 10013, September 18 – October 31, 2026. Photography courtesy Elisabeth Bernstein.
Asher Liftin: Recent Work, 395 Broadway, New York, NY 10013, September 18 – October 31, 2026. Photography courtesy Elisabeth Bernstein.
Asher Liftin: Taking photos for me became a way of trying to preserve the sensation of a fleeting visual experience. Through trying to translate these images into paintings I realized that their inability to stand in for the initial experience, the way they fail, creates an interesting dilemma for me.
All of the images I paint are composite photographs. For instance, there is a painting of a parking lot in the current exhibition. When I was taking the photo I captured many images, and then went back to the studio and took pieces of each to form the composition. The idea of expending effort and imagination to make something look found and ordinary is exciting to me.
I began to feel that the way color was mixed, and the way gesture entered the paintings, introduced a sense of subjectivity that I wanted to escape. I was more interested in making the process of the paintings’ construction their subject than the imagery they depicted. I started looking closely at the steps that make up the mental process of seeing and tried to develop a painting process with parallel steps. At first, the information is completely abstract, made up of tiny units that build through transparent layers to form lines, silhouettes, objects, and, finally, more abstract associations.
The parts that I can’t control are some of the most important parts of the painting. I have a lot of control over the painting when I am in the planning stage because I can tweak each element or step individually. But how the final painting actually turns out is a surprise to me. It can feel like I didn’t really make the painting myself and that distance excites me much more than when I understand why something looks the way it does.
The drips in the paintings in particular are important, because when you see the works from a distance and the images come together, the drips are still visible to remind you it is a painted image. The final painting has physicality and time in it.
Danny Sober, blue light, 2026. Oil on canvas, 14 × 20 cm. Courtesy of Adler Beatty.
Danny Sober, chorus, 2024. Oil on canvas, 27.9 × 35.6 cm. Courtesy of Gallery Vacancy.
Danny Sober: I fall in love with images to the point that they haunt me. They sit in the back of my head, and in quiet moments in a car or on a walk they come to the forefront. It's not the image itself haunting me, it's the potential of a painting it contains.
I have 15 reverse image tabs open at once and an archive of at least 10,000 screenshots that grows every week. I dig around before bed or as I'm watching a movie. Each image has its own pathways: green faces in ecstasy, claustrophobic yellow bedrooms. The images get deleted from the net so often it's a race against time. Some day I imagine Yandex's reverse image search will change its algorithm significantly, and all I'll be left with is my archive.
The duration of painting is the best litmus test for what sticks. The two red women in blue light, for example, have haunted me since 2022. I tried to paint them in 2024 and it didn't work; I did them better justice in 2026. If a haunting sticks around, it's a good indication it needs to be a painting.
The computer screen was a big influence: I learned to paint thin on a white ground, which gives my colors a bright, backlit quality. It also pushed acidic notes into an otherwise formal palette, like phthalo emerald popping between cadmiums and ochres. My images contain low-res pixel and chroma aberrations. I find those to be interesting entry points for color and edge in a painting, and it comes through in person. I only care about how paintings look in real life, and catfishing a painting online is a sin.
I love paintings that live in a grey area and defy easy compartmentalization. What's the point of a painting that spells out its message? That could veer into propaganda. Increasingly, I’ve become better at following my intuition and letting what happens on the canvas happen.
What I want from a painting hasn't changed. I'm looking for an emotional resonance that feels like me. For fifteen years I've been chipping away at a body of light inside myself, from different angles, to reach its core. I’m getting closer.
Words by Murphy Guo. Editor Lou Jiali.