Portrait of a Young Woman

From the Artist

As an Asian American artist, I am primarily interested in locating the human experience in historic events and drawing personal meaning from the past. Toward this end, I have relied heavily on firsthand accounts, family archives, and historic photographs to create new narratives about the Asian diaspora in the Americas. These visual narratives help me to explore the relationship between memory, art, and history and provide a personal sense of connection to the world around me. 

Portrait of a Young Woman is one of a series of portraits I have created which were based on archival photographs. Through the use of autobiography, family stories and photographs, historical material and oral histories, I create works on paper/pages of “living” history centered in the experiences of people whose voices have not been heard.  

Throughout my work, visual references are made to the screens, scrolls and motifs found in traditional Asian art. These references serve as a link between the past and the present, the exotic and the ordinary, and the foreign and the familiar. As a visual artist, I use the specificity of my experience as an Asian American as a personal space in which to locate broader issues of race and gender; a space through which a glimpse of common ground is made possible.

Unlike many younger artists who developed their love of printmaking as students in university printmaking departments, I learned how to etch and silkscreen  from working alongside other artists in shops like Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop and the Lower East Side Printshop in the 1970s—unconventional workspaces and printmaking centers for artists experimenting with the printed image.

Brandywine Workshop provided the added experience of a residency embedded in South Philadelphia which gave artists the time and space to engage in creative collaborations with their professional offset printers. 

Because of my rich history with these shops, printmaking has always been tied closely to the notion of an artist community supported and energized by the existence of these important non-profit work spaces. At a time when printmaking, as a genre, has been displaced by digital technology, I am grateful to Brandywine Workshop for keeping printmaking alive, and for continuing to give printmakers one of the finest opportunities to share their work and their collective vision for a more diverse and equitable art world.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}