the purell series | 2023 - 2024
In my latest series, I explore the Purell hand sanitizer bottle’s embodiment of purification amidst a period of global tragedy. Purell, with its defining "99.99%" germ-killing claim, gained an unmatched omnipresence during our recent pandemic, becoming a given and necessary fixture of our everyday settings. Its presence has since lingered, persistent and ghostlike, to this day. Through the use of soft pastels, three-dimensional sculptural oil paintings, impasto oil, and charcoal on paper, I aimed to depict Purell abstractly, experimenting with color and unconventional approaches in an effort to capture the essence of its strange yet undeniably intimate role in our lives born from the past two and a half years.
There are multiple forces at play within this single series. The Purell bottles served as a canvas for my own questions regarding the intricate dynamics of consumerism, branding, and capitalism, particularly in the context of the pandemic. During times of crisis, who are the winners, and who are the losers? Moreover, The Purell Clocks reflect on feelings of time-independent isolation, post-pandemic communal healing over time, and the seemingly absurd yet endless focus on mass disinfection across our world. Even more, works like "Purell Tower" delve deeper into the personal experience, tackling feminist themes of societal pressures – the ever-unattainable standards of perfection, flawlessness, and purity. Conclusions are left open to the viewer; I purposefully remain curious about this ongoing connection between cleaning products and gender roles.
Drawing inspiration from Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans, Paula Rego’s soft pastels mounted on aluminum, and Wayne Thiebaud’s attention to the still life, I paid homage to defining influences while shaping my own exploration of color, light, and form. This series has allowed me to reflect on the deep, multi-faceted symbolism and importance of Purell amidst our pandemic world, weaving in often overlooked matters of process and self-reflection, the delicate balance between cleanliness and sterilization, inevitable intertanglings of consumerism, and a cultural commentary on contemporary society.
tussie mussies | 2023 - Present
Living next to the flower district in New York City, I couldn’t help but be influenced by the floral shops I’d walk by on a regular basis. I often found myself returning home with a small bouquet, kindly gifted by shopkeepers clearing out unsold inventory on my way home from the studio. As a result, these flowers quickly found their way to center stage as I delved into my exploration of impasto, color, form, and gesture. Greatly inspired by Howard Hodgkin’s paintings, these floral pieces served as perfect subjects in my focus on pure color and form. I found my thoughts drawn to the tussie mussie: a small, handheld bouquet traditionally intended for a romantic or sentimental gift. Reaching back to an era where much emotion and sentiment were expressed through flora – the ‘language of flowers’ – the tussie mussie became a beloved muse of the Victorian era. Each particular flower within the arrangement carried with it a special symbolic meaning, able to convey a lot with just a little. This inherent ability of the tussie mussie resonated with me as I sought to emulate it with simple strokes. While these small, gifted bouquets were once carried close to the nose in the belief that they would ward off the plague within the surrounding air, I remain interested in the concept of the tussie mussie as a token of thought and healing within our current-day post-pandemic.
Just “DO” Flower Series | 2022 - Present
This flower series is influenced by Sol LeWitt's 1965 letter to Eva Hesse, and serves as a form of Monday Morning Motivation therapy through its reminder to "just do" during moments of self-doubt or creative blocks. These impasto paintings are also constructed by cake piping oil paints.
community Portraits | 2018 - present
My current paintings respond to the lack of Asian/Asian American representation in portraiture within our Western art institutions (particularly in modern and contemporary art). I wanted to question the idea of visibility, or invisibility – who gets honored and remembered in history, and who gets erased or forgotten. I was further inspired by the social media phenomenon of subtle asian traits, a Facebook group of over 1.9 million Asians living across the diaspora, yearning to feel a greater sense of inclusion or belonging. Believing that figurative work has the ability to empower one’s sense of self-worth, and with Asian Americans living in a society that rarely shows their faces in everyday media, I set out to paint these portraits as small efforts to help a community feel like they are part of a greater social conversation.
The sitters from my portraits are usually strangers that I find on the Internet, through social media groups or community organizations. I appreciate having strangers sit for me in-person during painting sessions; this is also the first time in which we meet. Because I have no pre-conceived notions of the individual, my interpretation of them comes directly from painting, which allows for much surprise and adventure in my creative process. The context of the painting (e.g. the background) often derives from a live narrative or personal memory shared with me by the sitter during our five-hour painting session. Through painting, I am able to informally survey members of my community to better understand the psychology of race, and the varying viewpoints my sitters have on ideas of home, immigration, prejudice, family, longing, love, and loss. A first-generation American myself, my practice allows me to further navigate my own identity as a painter who sees the world from both the lens of an ethnic majority in Asia, yet that of a minority in America.
As I continue to work on this series, I have begun to ask myself new questions in response to the narratives and concerns presented to me by my sitters: What does it mean to be an Asian female living in America? To think about assimilation, fitting into a society that still thinks of Asians under particular stereotypes (e.g. model minority myth, the perpetual foreigner, economic threat, Asian fetish); to constantly have to juggle between living in this psychological duality of space – too white one day and too Asian the next; to feel this forever sense of longing that is Freud’s racial melancholia in response to immigration.
My portraits allow me to continue to search for these answers – through the lens of the collective, and that of the self, which always inevitably appears through the mirror that is painting.