I am a Chinese American woman painter from Southern California. My paintings derive from the traditional Chinese brush-painted calligraphic mark. Real or imagined text is written in cursive running script in oil paint on the canvas as an underpainting that defines the basic compositional structure. Then the writing disappears under the clothing of Western abstraction, applied in chunks with a palette knife, creating the “furry” texture that is characteristic of my work. The process erodes the linguistic function of the marks, mirroring the cultural loss that immigrant

In her poem “The Language of the Brag,” Sharon Olds lays down her brag of her fullest self “pushing the new person out.” One person making another. That’s what we do, pregnant or not. Olds claims her brag for this heroic, but mostly invisible, act that women perform. I began looking for other brag moments that may be overlooked, and I found them in the selfies of the people who inspired my painting series The New Brag. Like Olds, I am reclaiming the word “brag” and its definition of being “full of oneself” as a positive and necessary stance for myself and all

There is a sometimes imaginary, sometimes real amount of control in how we interpret or conceptualize our personal environments. This psychological condition and the ensuing lack or actualization of comfort it produces are the focus of my work. Comfort and discomfort guide a person through their days, lives, and weekly grocery store trips. Expectations conditioned by experience collide with the unpredictability of reality. The disruptive juxtapositions are numerous and when taken in stride inspire curiosity. Interpreting the now through the jarring

My current body of work investigates personal stories, referencing life in South Florida. I view these paintings as nonlinear narratives prompted by biographical reference points. Memory is a form of imagination directed at the past and constructed in the present. It provides a set of specific parameters for imagery but also affords opportunities to experiment with subject/object emphasis and organization within the rectangle. The slippery nature of memory lends itself to playing with ideas of spatial ambiguity, volume, flatness, elongation, and compression. I like taking something

As an artist, I think about collision: flesh meeting the built world, the convergence of trauma and humor, and the connection between philosophy and its material expression. I am attracted to the quirks and frailties of human nature, individual and societal excess, and the dynamics of inner life. Through paint, other people’s photographs, and found language, I explore the intersection of these unlikely combinations, making new images that are at once upsetting and funny, confusing and revealing, painterly and harsh. My work appears coded, yet it is coherent

This work deals with (mis)representation, performance, otherness, and the construction of identity. By using my own form as a sort of elastic avatar, and appropriating motifs from both classical and comic realms, my paintings exist in a space that defies and subverts immediate assumption. Instead, I recast uncomfortable truths with an appetizing palette, utilizing selfconscious self-imagery and familiar language to navigate tense conversations with my viewer, and with myself.

My paintings are abstract allegorical landscapes of interwoven visual and narrative symbols. These symbols do not function as citational didactics but as enigmatic narrative projections. With each painting pointing back to the ones that preceded it, I am in conversation with the past. I mine utopian theory for inquiries into alchemy, movement, gender, and color:

I trace patterns of personal, familial, and social identity within the genre of Black portraiture. As a first-generation Canadian with strong Trinidadian roots, I grew up in two different cultural milieus. My practice grows from this concern: a negotiation of my enduring cultural divergence between displacement and indigeneity; divided, yet rooted in multiple places at once.