Senior Body of Work/ YMTUTSM Artist Statement

April, 2025

In life, the strongest influences on our identities and values are often our families and childhoods. My work is motivated by honoring and preserving my family relationships by creating an archive of paintings of shared memories, some of which I have only experienced through photographs. In the work, I blur the line between the photo, painting, and memory to capture the moments as I remember or imagine them. To create my work, I use acrylic paint on primed canvas, which allows for flexibility and enables me to achieve soft figures and textures to capture the fuzziness, ambiguity, and warmth of memory.

For this body of work, the creation process is as important as the final product. Each reference photograph holds its own significance, and the paintings created from them serve as sites and evidence of contemplation. The time consuming process of translating photographs into paintings allows me to spend time with the subjects, revealing new insights into my relationships with them. Leaning into the painterly aspects of my work such as visible brush strokes, underpaintings, and areas left unrendered enable me to explore these revelations visually.

Gaining inspiration from the works of Jun Aihara, Christine Tien Wang, and Hayley Chiu, I reconstruct narratives from photographic imagery to create open-ended works that an audience can connect with beyond their own personal experiences. Having direct control of my own personal history through the paintings helps me to make sense of my disjointed childhood split between parents and locations, while highlighting connection to my sister as a constant.