Happy member of a lonely arts club

Clementine Chan is almost a caricature of a young, brooding artist. 'I have been alone all my life,' she says from her small studio above Wong Tai Sin, where she can often be found painting vigorously, along with three cats.

As Chan leads me through her portfolio of lonely little oil paintings, one thing becomes strikingly clear. The nine-floor walk up to her place begins to make sense: loneliness is Chan's speciality. 'I like to spend time alone and expect to be lonely forever,' she says. 'People are really lonely in the end because they die alone. If you are ill or in pain, nobody can help you. You are always by yourself.'

Her aptly titled new show, Shadowland, which opened at Bark Modern Art on Tuesday as part of the 'Ladies of the Galleries' exhibition with Sarah Asch and Jenni Kelly, is a small retrospective of 10 oils, all of which capture the recurring theme of solitude.

Chan's paintings are similar to diary entries and her desire to treat the canvas as a mode for emotional escape is obvious. Yet her works have a maturity far beyond that of her self-defined label of 'weekend painter'. She often reduces narrative devices down to a single figure, its shadow, and a tree, which are meant to represent larger emotions. Her works are simple and powerful, like visual haikus. 'I love trees,' she says. 'I think they are a symbol of life and I think they know a lot of stories that I don't. It gives me peace when I look at trees.'

It was during her time at Chinese University, where Chan studied journalism and communications, that she began to dabble in painting because 'I can use paintings to express myself much better than words'. She began to train with a local painting instructor and, in 1997, moved to New York for eight months where she studied painting at Parson's School of Design. Not surprisingly, she was very lonely.

'I just wanted to get out of Hong Kong because I think Hong Kong is very suffocating. I wanted to travel a bit and wanted to stay in a totally new place. But it was not a very happy experience. I was quite disoriented. I had two good friends already there but I didn't really make friends with anyone else during my time there. New York is a very lonely city.'