Artist research notes

In her work, Chen searches for the “meaning of home”, which could be the result of her numerous cultural identities from family members migrating all around the world at different points in her life

She was born to a family of farmers from rural China and Taiwan villages, they later immigrated to Hong Kong in the late 1980s during the handover, Chen grew up in a British boarding school in Hong Kong, before immigrating to the US for university

She gathers models for her paintings through social media community groups like Subtle Asian traits, Subtle Asian Life NYC, Chinatowns of New York City, NYC Yang Gang, etc
Instead of having the model just pose, the five-hour painting session involves Chen multitasking between having a conversation with the model(s) and her painting
She says she usually lets the conversation lead the painting and guide it towards a certain aesthetic / outcome - the conversations are usually about the model’s Asian American experience and cultural identity
Along with searching for the meaning of home, Chen also uses painting as a way of confronting her own fears, desires, insecurities, and questions of her own cultural identity, and uses them as a way to grant visibility to her under-represented community - as there is a lack of Asian American representation in Western portraiture
- Portraiture is the recording of an individual’s appearance and personality through the recording of psychological characteristics using color, patterns, and tone of lines, it’s different from pure portraits that are just a recording of what one sees as the model
Her art tackles a variety of conflicts, questions, and topics all relating to being an Asian-American:
- The truth of stereotypes, model minority myths, the perpetual foreigner, economic threat, racial melancholia, assimilation of cultures
She strives to not only highlight a yearning for acceptance from her society but also for Asian-Americans to reach self-acceptance

I chose to research about this artist because I was really drawn to the themes in which she explores in her work. Home, identity and self-acceptance are all things I am constantly thinking about especially now that I'm in university and am living a significantly more independent life compared to when I lived at home in Hong Kong with my family. I can relate to the feeling of being an outsider even in one's own home city because as a student who went to an international school, while my English linguistic abilities skyrocketed from the exposure, I found that my Chinese became lacking both in speaking and listening, which really isolated me from my peers who could speak fluently in Chinese. I thought that her work was really unique in that throughout the process of painting it is always going through constant change influenced by the conversation she's having with a client. The stories and emotions discussed between the client and artist determine the painting's outcome in layout and mood, I think it's really clever and it guarantees a wholly unique painting in each work she takes on because no conversation and no client would share the same perspective.

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