Where Logic and Emotion Collide
Have you ever felt as though another version of you was waiting quietly beneath the surface? For Mariah Solikin, a contemporary artist based in Hong Kong, that feeling became impossible to ignore during the stillness of the pandemic. Born in Indonesia, raised in Singapore, and living in Hong Kong for more than 25 years, Mariah spent decades working in banking and finance before returning to a long-dormant passion for fine art. Her shift from finance to full-time artist was not simply a career change. It was a reinvention. Today, her abstract paintings bring together two seemingly opposite worlds: analytical logic and raw emotion. Mariah’s background in finance continues to shape her approach to the canvas. Her compositions often carry a strong sense of structure, balance, and intention. Yet within those boundaries, colour moves freely, gestures open up, and emotion takes over. The result is work that feels both controlled and alive. She often references the double-slit experiment in quantum physics, where light behaves as both particle and wave. In her paintings, this idea becomes a metaphor for identity and possibility. Solid lines meet fluid movement. Precision meets spontaneity. Structure and feeling exist at the same time. Mariah is also a writer, pairing many of her paintings with original reflective poetry. These poems offer collectors a deeper look into the emotional world behind each piece, turning her abstract works into personal milestones of self-discovery. A recurring theme in her practice is the idea of “what if.” When developing a concept, she often creates sister variations of the same work, allowing alternate choices and parallel paths to exist side by side. Through this process, her paintings explore the many versions of ourselves that could have been, and the ones we still carry within us. Although she entered the professional art world relatively recently, Mariah’s rise has been swift. Her multi-layered painting Surge was selected for a major…