Growing up, I was always intrigued and excited by art; and as I grew older it became a way to escape the banalities and unpleasantries of everyday life. I still remember the posters of works by famous modern painters that graced the display cases in the hallway of my kindergarten school and my first encounter with the magic that is craft glitter! As a teenager, I received a lot of criticism about the way that I looked; and hence art re-emerged as a way that I could enjoy, engage with, and create beauty, without having to think about my own inability to be beautiful (a belief I have since identified as being false and limiting). Later on, in college, where I unexpectedly decided to double major in visual art and art history, art further developed into a channel for me to express myself, explore my relationship to the world, and process complex emotions and difficult life experiences. 

 

I am of half Chinese and half Ashkenazi decent and grew up in the suburbs of New York during the 80’s and 90’s, when globalization was at full speed. I spent my childhood surrounded by the diverse plethora of images that the mass media (television, magazines, posters, consumer goods, etc.) then made possible and filled my everyday environments with. I took pleasure in cutting up the many magazines that I coopted from my parents and making large, complex collages for all of my friends with glitter lettering, which is still a slightly guilty pleasure of mine. 

 

Between American school, Chinese school, and Hebrew School, I attended school every day of the week - enjoying the different types of art I was exposed to in each. I also became accustomed to elements of different cultures being mixed together early on. For example, my lunchbox would be filled with a home-cooked Chinese food, a boxed guava drink from the Asian market, and an American fruit roll up, while dinners at home similarly involved a mish-mash of Chinese and American cooking. 

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At Brown University, I fell in love with Art History, which had not been offered at the otherwise excellent public high school that I attended. During this time, I began making larger paintings under the direction of my college mentor, Wendy Edwards, who encouraged me to work large and explore my identity as an artist. I was naturally drawn to making collage-inspired paintings and the process of collaging as a way of quickly outputting ideas. For my final thesis in the honors program at Brown, I combined different aesthetic styles and used imagery that I loved from Art History, my life, and popular culture to explore my questions about life, the world around me, the human condition, personal identity, and even art itself - which I still do to this day.

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As a professional artist, my art brain is forever active, going in a multitude of directions at once. I continue to explore my questions about life and my fascination with people, art history, popular culture, technology, consumerism, and nature through my artwork. My creative process begins with the mass accumulation of images and ideas from a range of everyday sources, including my life experiences and surroundings, the Internet, art history books, and consumer culture. I then draw upon these sources when I am ready to work, which directly and indirectly inform the paintings that I make. 

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I enjoy working in nearly every fine art medium and at different scales and dimensions. For the moment, my practice is focused on oil and acrylic painting on canvas, but I have previously worked in digital photography, video, collage, assemblage, sculpture, watercolor, gouache, drawing, and installation. Visually, my work is brightly colored, graphic, often collage based or informed, and sometimes self referential; involves an unusual combination of elements; and draws inspiration from 20th century modern painting, assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, Surrealism, and photorealism. 

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