STATEMENT OF WORK

My paintings deal with personal and collective emotions of being a first-generation immigrant in America, revolving around themes of alienation, displacement, and self-contradiction. I use a deconstructed and allegorical approach to create my painted scenes, incorporating my memories and experiences of my native country, China, as well as my current residence in America. My past experience during the Cultural Revolution in China, a time of social unrest, widespread propaganda, violence, and expected obedience to authority, has informed the underlying mood of my paintings and my questions of the place of the individual self in relation to its society. In my work I am interested in dualisms and tensions between the preservation of history and erasure, belonging and alienation, and material body and soul. I juxtapose symbols of construction, detritus, ritual, and ambivalence to reference my Chinese American immigrant experience and personal emotions that are in flux alongside historical and contemporary social environments.