06/10/2026
I haven’t shared these paintings before, but my trip to China has inspired me to share them.
Last year I began to paint some figurative work, pulling references from my trip to Beijing last summer, in 2025. Before that trip, I hadn’t been back to my parent’s home country in over 7 years. I had a lot of big feelings during that trip, seeing how much the city had changed from how I remembered it from my childhood and seeing how much my relatives had aged. It was also the first time I visited China as a proper working adult (instead of a recent grad), and I felt like I saw things from a different perspective, noticing these nuances in behavior shaped by culture.
But I was also struck with how similar we all are. My whole life, I’ve felt like I’ve straddled two worlds, feeling culturally different growing up in America but also feeling SO American in China. But as I noticed little moments and interactions between people, I could see a common humanity that flowed through people no matter where I was.
I believe that where you grow up shapes the person you become, but that we also have shared human experiences independent of place. I created these paintings to convey that sentiment. I ended up submitting a number of these pieces as part of my portfolio for my graduate school applications, with the intention of expanding upon this new direction.
