I moved to the United States from Taiwan when I was 14. This experience of being transplanted from my home, family, and culture had a huge impact on me and my work. While it was liberating to raise myself with my two sisters in the US, there was also something unsettling about this sudden sense of dislocation.
The images that I paint all have some disturbing quality, whether it’s the angle of the character’s head or the awkwardness of the distorted bodies. But in order to complicate these unsettling images, I use strong yellow hues to create a warm overall lighting that emanates throughout the entire space. I like this idea of “peaceful violence,” of seducing the viewer with bright colours, while simultaneously confronting them with the damaged characters.
Through my use of luminescent palette and theatrically charged compositions, I am working to create a decidedly feminine perspective that embodies my generation’s precareious state of un-balance.
I am interested in the narrative quality of painting. I am trying to create artwork that seduces the spectator to engage it intellectually and emotionally and finish its story , like the beginning of a short story or the punch line of an unsettling joke.
