Over the past decade, the artist has been exploring the idea of a Personal Identity. Creating nine series of works, she threaded concepts between the identity of a body, identity of memory, and identity of impermanence, investigating the complex layers of identity. Through her research, the artist realized that there is an aspect of true “self” within everyone: the singular individuality unique to each person. Regale reflects the artist’s journey of re-discovering that aspect and reconnecting to the pure joy of creating through authenticity. In this series, she uses Manhwa (manga) and Impressionist styles to represent the Eastern and Western influences that shaped her as a younger self. The works represent her external, internal, and spiritual identity in archetypal representations.
Beliefs are frameworks of our perception. Based on beliefs, we perceive how we present ourselves and others, influencing our experiences in the world. When beliefs are reinforced, our perceptions become defined and even rigid, creating preconceived notions that produces division, dislocation, and separation. In this series, the artist challenges viewers’ perceptions by creating works with faded boundaries and off-focused images, demanding viewers to unfocus. Symbolically, she asks viewers to perceive with fluidity and softer boundaries, easing austere perspectives to experience the world with more openness.
The artist paired images of shirts with individuals’ obituaries found online. She portrays traces of a person and memory. The clothes usually represent the expressions of individualities and personality, however, in Innocence in Silence, the clothes are presented as a symbol of body’s vacancy and impermanence, which are empty of meanings pertained to features, age, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In addition, the obituaries represent perception of others and their influences on creating an identity. The artist asks viewers to contemplate impermanence and encourages to remove the significance we put on our body identity and others’ opinions to understand ourselves.
Naughty Girls is a collection of watercolor paintings, sculptures, and decorated ceramic tiles. The female characters are primal, have manga-like features, and are provocative and shameless to be what they want to be. These characters are whimsical representations of Asian females that defy stereotypes. They are playful and raw, teasing viewers in pleasurable and discomforting ways. The artist examines sexuality and death as primal influences on our lives and questions our limited perceptions towards them.
Inspired by the artist’s daily meditation practice, Being series explores the idea of being in the present. By creating with no pre-conceived notion of the process or the outcome, the creative process flew organically, mimicking nature, resembling unpredictable weather and the changing seasons. She used objects found in daily life, embedding them into layers of wax and resin. Fallen leaves, pressed flowers, and dried insects were juxtaposed with personal items like photographs, handkerchiefs, and jewelry. The artist used them as shapes and colors to create compositions and communicate symbolic stories of memories, time, and personality.
I Am consists of paintings of found objects cut off from life, such as fallen tree leaves, withered flowers, and insects frozen and dried in time. The artist captures the fragility of the shell-like subjects by painting them from observation and using watercolor to show their delicate nature. Without suggesting perspective or constructing a space, the subjects float in the negative white space, an aesthetic inspired by Eastern Asian traditional paintings. In this series, the artist examines the intimacy of death in daily life, and she curiously questions the existence beyond our body and mind. The subjects are embraced by the expansive negative space, which refers to the universe that cherishes individual beings in equality, with no sense of hierarchy or preference. The artist invites viewers to contemplate every being’s ultimate destiny, the impermanence, and also challenges audiences to find serenity in our shared journey.
Memories series consists of acrylic paintings on black and white prints of movie scenes. The artworks are reliefs created by heavily accumulated paint strokes. With 0.5% pigment added to a transparent acrylic medium, the artist painted thousands of strokes to the original image, obscuring the actual representation. Depending on the initial value of the image, different amounts of paint are needed, so the outcome becomes a relief that echoes the original idea. In this series, the artist explores the idea of collective and individual memory. She mimics the concept of Memory Work, which refers to how people interpret a previous experience to make sense of our present circumstance. In that translating process, the original experience morphs into a different, new language, far from being what it used to be. However, people tend to consider memories an absolute truth and rely on them to understand their identities. The artist challenges the memories to be a viable truth and even questions if any past experiences are relevant to who we are in the present.
Shell is a series of self-portraits of the artist. The artist perceived her body as an inanimate object like a still-life or a shell encasing another being. Her works speak to her body identity of being an Asian female. Her attitude towards the body expresses a sense of dislocation, separation, and isolation. There is a lack of connection to the body and disagreement with any notions that pertain to it. In this series, the artist metaphorically conveys her overwhelming emotion weighted by the expectations surrounding the Asian female body while questioning her relationship to the form.
