"Marilyn Monroe" Painting

My name is Peijuan—pronounced like Page One. I am an artist devoted to exploring beauty, emotion, and imagination across multiple forms. Art has never felt separate from life for me; it has been the way I understand, question, and shape the world since childhood. Born in Shanghai and based in New York City for the past three decades, I bring together a long-standing fine art practice with over twenty-eight years of professional experience as a Creative Director, Principal Designer, and multimedia artist. I earned my MFA with Highest Honors from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and while holding senior design leadership roles—including serving as Vice President of Design at a major technology firm—I have remained deeply committed to my studio practice. My work spans oil painting, installation, video, digital media, and performance. Since the age of eight, my art has been exhibited internationally, with eleven exhibitions to date. Across mediums, I am drawn to the tension between inner experience and external form—how memory, emotion, and perception quietly shape the way we inhabit the world. My current body of work, MOMENTS, reflects this focus. The series explores personal memory and emotional residue through figurative and abstract painting. Soft, textured female forms often emerge from layered, tactile surfaces, creating a dialogue between strength and vulnerability. Nature, fashion, social awareness, and environmental concerns inform these works—not as illustration, but as lived presence within the image. At the heart of my practice is a fascination with subjectivity—how the same moment can be shared yet remembered differently by each person. My paintings are grounded in lived experience, both joyful and painful, translated through brushwork, color, mark-making, and texture on canvas and ceramic surfaces. Outside the studio, I draw inspiration from movement, travel, and everyday observation—whether walking through unfamiliar cities, studying architecture, cooking Asian or Italian food, or finding quiet beauty in human connection and the natural world.