Jesse Zuo is a New York-based Chinese oil painter and illustrator. Through figurative images, she expresses her take on femininity, physicality, emotions, and precious moments in life. She practices detail-focused traditional realism and explores contemporary expression in chromatic colors.

 My paintings’ shifting readability generates a fluidity between absence and presence, reflecting the flickering state of being created from living with a chronic disease. Working with motifs of miniatures and toys, I am interested in scale, motion, and repetition. What does it mean to make the miniature giant, to make the giant miniature, or to allow the miniature to remain?

 I use painting as a way to reconstruct my internal experiences and explore unrecognizable emotions through personal allegories. My works reflect my own desires as a drifter in life, as well as societal pressures and responsibilities demanded of a painter. While I start painting with daily sketches and writings, I deviate from the initial plan by incorporating unexpected elements throughout my painting process. This approach allows me to create dramatic and absurd worlds within my paintings.

 Characters and symbols make sense within their context, but when that context is removed absurdity steps in and alienation is portrayed. In my work, I investigate the animal body as a traditional and contemporary symbol, and question how we represent them in culture, translation, and as commodities. These animal allegories provide context to my own feelings of displacement; through visual signifiers of culture, they seek to explore how the idea of what is “traditional” can differ from person to person.

 My work explores gendered tension in the domestic sphere. These paintings depict the home as a fraught refuge, evoking suspense and unease through horror film tropes. Combining naturalistic techniques with surreal elements, I examine household rituals that are rooted in my Midwestern upbringing.

 My paintings play with a tension between hiding and communicating. The images depict characters breaking pianos, grieving over violins, committing acts of betrayal, and experiencing bouts of ecstasy and terror. Pulling from my own history as a musician, I am interested in conveying psychological states through narrative and destabilized compositions. Each painting portrays solitary figures struggling against the edges of the canvas and the instrument at hand, sometimes resisting and other times merging.

 Drawing from various languages of abstraction—from Western modernist painting, to Andean textile design—I explore how the manipulation of painting, textiles, and traditional techniques can create tensions that reveal ideas about ancestral inheritance and transference, familial upbringing, and psychological contradiction. Through investigating these legacies of making, I invent studio rituals using formal painting moves and quotidian references to arrive at a place of intimacy.

I gravitate toward narrative tropes and archetypes; both serve as conceptual frameworks for generating imagery. Layers of paint, ranging from thin to thick, work to inform the figures’ emotions; the materiality of glazes, stains, and opaque passes of paint parallel the emotional layering of people and place. Character development emerges from internal transformations, the identity crisis of the protagonist mirroring the identity crisis of culture itself.

 Collapsing inner and outer vision onto canvas, Sabrina Piersol investigates the value of the fragment as it relates to Archaic Greek, sapphic poetry through her environmental paintings. These works raise questions around desire, temporality, and speculative extrapolation by negotiating conceptual inquiry and visual logic. Piersol intends for her paintings to be accessible in their abstraction through combining explicit allusions to the natural world with purely abstract forms via a singular, cohesive painting language that prioritizes bold color and melodic composition.

 Drawing from his own experiences, Sangun Park’s art serves as a means to confront and transcend personal pain. His series “On My Shelf” explores objects on a shelf arranged by the artist’s aesthetic and criteria of value; it reflects his concept of value as intertwined with life’s finite and infinite aspects, mortality, and the embrace of imperfection. Park’s life has limitations, while his collections can fluctuate in value, mirroring the mutable nature of his own name and works as affected by condition, time, and perspective.