Sofia Lo

For Singapore-based Taiwanese artist Sofia Lo, every experience is produced by a trauma and its intensity. Her desire is to express the intensity of that trauma through an artistic process she calls "distillation." The inspiration for the artistic mode of "distillation" emerges organically from Sofia's experience of negotiating and renegotiating her identity as a modern nomad. Rather than viewing her existence as "root-less," Sofia has sought to memorialize her experiences by capturing mood in the amber of her canvas. If the nomad is typically imagined to be a barbarian who disregards the heritage of each place he travels, Sofia sees her nomadism as a form of pilgrimage -- and honors the mood of each place and each culture she encounters.

A devotee of the great romantics and expressionists, Sofia uses her canvas to pay homage to the lines of Schiele, the colors of Klimt, and the intense moods of Alma-Tadema. But it was the moodscapes of certain metropoles in Asia that concretized these stylistic influences. The aesthetics of the old pleasure quarters in Gion, Kyoto inspired in her a desire to capture on canvas the paradoxical intensity of the evanescent transience of beautiful things. A world away from Japan, amidst the steamy c...

Dissatisfied with the current climate in established art schools, which rejects the techniques of the great masters in favor of randomness and improvisation, Sofia set out to educate herself in the formative traditions of modern art. Sofia established her technique on the firm foundations of Ruskin's instruction on the realist sketch. A devoted disciple of Ruskin, Sofia spent two years sketching the natural world in Taipei, Kyoto, and Northern California. Sofia's transition from master sketches to the oil medium was informed by her reading of the classic manuals of the great Renaissance humanists: Ceninno Ceninni and Da Vinci. But it was not until Sofia moved to the Netherlands that she encountered the unparalleled realism of the Dutch masters. Spending her days at the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Mauritshuis, Sofia cultivated the technique that marked the high point in European portraiture -- glazing. Glazing is the practice of layering transparent films of pigmented oil which produces jewel-like colors. While glazing allowed for the intense expression of color, it was her encounter with the dynamism of the Expressionist forms of Klimt, Schiele, and Kandinsky that inspired Sofia to develop the unique style she calls "...