Spotlight: Paintings

Artist Statement

Coming from an ethnic background and living in a diverse city like Los Angeles, my work reflects my identity as an Asian American female facing internal struggles over a lost sense of sameness and continuity.

My work explores psychological spaces using imagery based in childhood memories, tales, and narratives. Representational figures of women and animals are used as surrealist metaphors for the self, often alongside imagery inspired by Freud’s notion of the uncanny, where something familiar and old manifests itself as fear and anxiety.

I’m interested in drawing viewers into a space where both they and myself as the artist are implicated and reflected. I juxtapose disparate, disjointed, and repeated elements: shadow vs. light, two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional space, geometric vs. organic, hard vs. soft, and abstraction vs. realism. These elements create visual tension, evoking a sense of the uncanny.