Since beginning to teach myself how to paint in 2016, and following my graduation from the Painting and Drawing MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021, my practice has taught me three key lessons: (1) it takes the most difficult work to make something seem simple; (2) the object is trying to feel and understand every emotion as you work through them; and (3) there is always more to learn.

I make paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore formal questions of space, color, form, and line in informal and playful ways by using diverse materials. My abstract visual language often includes organizing conventions—such as nets, webs, and grids—and more spontaneously emerging forms and marks. In these paintings, I start with a delicate, carefully constructed surface before an inherent geometry emerges that gets played with and interrupted as I populate the painting.

My work is rooted in my identity as a daughter of immigrants from Pakistan and Guatemala. Through paintings, drawings, and objects, I explore the cultural, racial, and ethnic melancholy and isolation of living in an American suburb. Gardens, windows, fences, and objects represent the many facets of my identity as a child of immigrants, a multi-racial and multi-ethnic woman, subjected to American history and idealism. Objects become vessels of exchange between cultures and generations, as well as channels to explore the romantic, religious, personal, and political.

Lying through the fog and wild thickets of the rural Midwest landscape are isolated and zealot sectors of Christianity. Spiritual leaders in closed communities build proverbial arks containing traditions of hierarchy that create a culture of erasure and duty, all while hiding under the guise of biblical rhetoric. My collage work attempts to modernize biblical stories and rural cultural mythologies in a way that highlights forms of injustice or hierarchy.

Traveling between the US and Taiwan for the past eight years, I find myself constantly struggling to define where home is and who I am. In my recent body of work, I take inventory of my life. I pick objects that I’m particularly fond of and paint them from life. Through the act of looking and painting, I reconstruct the connection between the objects and myself and implant my own character and narrative in them. I approach each painting as a journey of self-reflection and exploration.

Through oil painting and mixed media works on canvas, I am interested in exploring issues of Indigeneity and the contemporary Indigenous experience as it relates to the Western world. As a First Nations person from Canada, I am aware that oil painting is a European tradition in the arts. This informs my practice as I include traditional elements of Canadian Aboriginal culture, or—as we are more widely known here in the United States—the Native American or American Indian.

Drawing from the post-socialist landscape of and attitudes about the former Yugoslavia, I analyze collective memory politics and the archive. I create in between spaces, concentrating on objects, architectural features, political photographs, and embroidered words to mimic the geographic and political placement of a departed country. Dissecting the dissonance between national attitudes and my own feelings of displacement, the images and historical design in my pieces memorialize a long gone environment and reflect upon contemporary disillusionment.

I am absorbed in the creation of a fantasy world that unifies external and internal landscapes. Trees, mountains, skies, and bodies of water are arranged architecturally alongside glowing spherical forms I see as celestial bodies or musical notes. Over the years, recurring shapes in nature, art historical treatments of landscape, and synesthetic visual experiences have been absorbed and catalogued. I also spend time investigating religious art across epochs and cultures, borrowing compositional elements to represent nature’s inherent spirituality.

Lunday’s paintings distort the boundaries between the real and the artificial to consider the constructions of relationships in a world informed by celebrity culture. Her figures are modeled on the endless cycle of celebrities from reality television, Instagram, and tabloids. Combining images from these sources with her own personal photographs, the artist focuses on the messy ethics of our instantly-famous culture to create tableaus of romantic engagement where genuine emotion is hidden behind precarious notions of selfhood and awkward moments of human interaction.

Lyn Liu was born and grew up in Beijing, China. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she achieved her two Bachelor degrees in Fine Arts. She is currently an MFA candidate for the Columbia Visual Arts program. Liu works in painting, printmaking, and publication. Her work focuses on the interdependent relationship between an individual and a community. The psychological perspective from which she views the social strategy is closely linked to her biography.