Artist Statement
Hiraeth - (n.) a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past, for people and things long gone; regret
My senior show explores the concept of hiraeth in the three series presented: "Diaspora", "How I Search for You", and "Consumed". It is a meditation on the mourning and longing for a home, family, and companion. To find belonging, for a moment of clarity within the distortion and disorder of the world.
I depicted my reflections on these personal questions through the traditional mediums of oil paint, watercolor, and alcohol markers. In a sense, every image is a self-portrait. My primary influences are the visual artists Shane Berkery, Francis Bacon, and Junji Ito. As an adopted Chinese young adult who is exceptionally detached from her heritage, this body of work is also my attempt to connect to my Asian culture through character design, mythological imagery, aesthetics, and cultural references. It exemplifies where I currently am in my journey: a chaotic amalgamation of Western and Eastern cultures, a gradual healing process, a hand reaching out, a bone-deep feeling of hiraeth.
"Diaspora" adds surreal color and abstraction to its references: 1950s black-and-white images of Asian diasporas, people driven from home. I acutely identify with those on the outskirts, humans who are told that they do not belong anywhere, cast away and stuck in a strange liminal space, native and foreigner, abandoned and adopted, minority and majority, loved and unloved. The objective of this series is to imbue new life and perspective into the photographs of these displaced people, to provide them with a home in a new and constructed reality, to give form to the hiraeth they must certainly have ached with.
"How I Search for You" reflects on the concept of family and it was primarily created last semester in Orvieto, Italy. In the narrative, the character begins as a child with a long wick, full of hope, but as he gets older, the wick gets lower and lower. He searches new places: America, Orvieto, Korea, for something which can never be found, for matches to keep the fire burning, to prolong the search for but a few more minutes. He seeks on hilltops before an endless patchwork vista. He is fragmented in much the same way. But ultimately, he is alone with small comforts, the searchlight slowly dying, the wretched and curious mystery of the unknown drawing near. I search everywhere and in everything, but I think that what I am seeking never truly existed, the unbroken relationship with my families, a place to call home, a world before the fall.
"Consumed" is a horror manga-inspired watercolor and marker art book and graphic novel about an abusive relationship, the turbulent account of the two male characters juxtaposed with deer butchery imagery. The way in which victims are distorted and reduced to something subhuman, a piece of meat, by their abusers is explored in the watercolor deer paintings. How simple and dangerous it can be to lose yourself in a new person who you are desperate to call your home. It contemplates the concepts of disordered desire, birth and death, plants and humanity, the agony of life and love.
My greatest hope as an artist is to create a body of work that speaks to others’ questions and struggles, to help them process through their own lives by looking at mine, to show that art can be unitive through rather than despite the diversity of the world. I hope to help galvanize a sort of communal catharsis so that others may unearth something so specific in imagery so general and ambiguous and something general and universal in something so specific to the artist, to find how to be whole in a world so fragmented. To discover a moment of clarity within the chaos of the world. To find a way home.
