Artist Statement

Jordan Nobuko Baker’s still life oil paintings meticulously observe natural and material culture through the lens of what is gained, lost, flattened, or enriched in the transitions between seasons, generations, and cultures. Her sensitive yet strategic compositions explore embodied experience and everything it carries - fragility, sensuality, fecundity, and decay - with rapt attention to material texture, spacial depth, and the clarity of edges separating distinct forms as they share space, sometimes peacefully, sometimes with tension. Her paintings’ hyperrealism reflects a fascination with what is observable and accessible, often in analogous or complementary color schemes deliberately and harmoniously designed. Whether the subject is an abundant harvest of fruit, a vanitas meditation juxtaposing the fragile floral with the fragile bone, or her own blended cultural inheritance, Jordan’s work asks how we can learn to accept the inevitability of change, and how to navigate it with grace and appreciation even when we feel conflicted about what happens in the transition.

Jordan was born to a Chinese-Japanese mother and Euro-American father and raised in Connecticut. As a second- and third-generation American, she grew up absorbing her heritage out of context. From celebrating Chinese Lunar New Year with her Japanese grandmother in New York City’s Chinatown to buying and selling Japanese screens (byobu), while working for an Italian-American antiques dealer, her access to and understanding of her own heritage was often filtered through American middlemen, capitalist commercialization, and class differences. Questions of what is kitsch and caricatured versus what is quality and authentic can feel ontological in the decontextualized collage of America’s “melting pot”. Having lived and worked primarily in the Hudson River Valley, Jordan’s experience with rapid and sharp seasonal change similarly informs her interest in what is lost, what adapts, and what survives through forced transition. Her paintings confront the timeless question of vanitas - how do we integrate the mono no aware of a vitality that has to change and die - from her own singular and contemporary perspective in a changing and conflicted world.

Jordan is represented by Spalding Nix Fine Art in Atlanta, Ga. Her work has been exhibited by D’Arcy/Simpson Gallery… She holds a BFA in Art History from Syracuse and an MFA in Combined Media from SUNY Albany. She has been painting since 2018 and is now based in Savannah, Ga.