My undergraduate experience honed my passion for art history. I attended the Art Institute of Chicago and we had our own museum next to the school. When I needed inspiration, I could always go into the museum and look at how artists before me perfected their craft. My earliest influences were Van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin, and Cézanne. Cézanne still has a profound impact on my work because of his emphasis on the act of looking. We’re so used to seeing the world through a lens or a camera that sometimes we forget about the phenomenology of looking with our eyes. In my work, I place the viewer in my perspective, presenting the gaze of the artist.
When I make works, I start with basic sketches in pencil, then I will work on color studies before I move on to larger-scale painting. Sometimes, I use my iPad in between processes just to see how it would look if I tweak a color, but I mainly stick to sketches and oils. When I’m making a painting I will ask: Where is this? What time of day is it? Where is the light shining from? Is this a strong or soft light? What does light mean metaphorically and how does it change the narrative?
I’ve lived in so many different places–Harbin, Singapore, Chicago, and now New York. Each city is not just different culturally but also has a different aesthetic and color palette. For example, Singapore is a lush, bright city, whereas Chicago and New York are more gray. I think a lot about light, and in some paintings, I might even think about how humid that environment would be. Humidity would create haziness, so I would incorporate more gray, creating a veil over the painting.
The two colors I’m interested in for my current piece are nickel yellow and cobalt teal bluish. I discovered these two colors while I was making a painting about Vermeer and researching the pigments he used. I tried to find the exact pigments and nickel yellow was one of them. It’s much cooler than cadmium yellow and captures the cold light of the Northern Hemisphere. The blue that I chose is a turquoise, teal, greenish color. It gives the painting a sense of uneasiness and is less welcoming than ultramarine or baby blue, which provide a sense of innocence. I have a whole chart of different pigments, including their drying rate, lightfastness, and opacity. It’s very important to me.
Home for me is constantly shifting, so my paintings often hold a sense of yearning and longing. In my last series, A Thousand Ships, I was thinking through the theme of yearning, using ships and the sea as a metaphor for home. Home for me is always shifting, but I still can establish a nest for myself in that movement. Some other diasporic artists might imagine themselves as a bridge between cultures, but I like to think of myself as a ship, alone, drifting in the waters.
I enjoy creating my own world in painting because, in reality, there are not many places where I feel comfortable just existing. By painting, I’m digging out a cave that I can just exist in, like a fortress you built when you were a kid. I love my personal space. This concept underpins my new series, where I’m painting musicians, dancers, and artists in their element, enjoying their solitude in their craft.
Images courtesy of the artist, Make Room Gallery, and Shuyao Chen.