https://www.instagram.com/crystalmonkeycalligraphy

Artist Statement

I am a Queer gender-non-comforming mixed-race Chinese American multidisciplinary artist.

In practice, I am a painter—I make paintings, and I practice and perform Chinese calligraphy, one of the oldest continuous lineages of painting. Still, identifying as a painter has never rolled off my tongue without hesitation. 

When I look at the canon of Western painting, I see a beautiful world, but a world where neither myself nor the people I call family exist. Thinking about making paintings often brings me back to Audre Lorde’s essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Deconstruct the Master’s House. Lorde discusses how a structure of oppression, by design, omits the tools necessary for liberation. How can I participate in painting while simultaneously problematizing its authority and the white supremacy and Queer/Transphobia implicit in its history?