Fighting Spirit I Print

My figurative acrylic paintings depict me as a woman in fantasy and an animal figure that represents subdued masculinity. In depicting myself as a woman and a male animal, I follow the role model of the Japanese onnagata in Kabuki Theatre, who alternate between masculine and feminine persona in private and public. I also oppose the whitewashing and racialization of beauty in popular culture by pursuing a hybrid beauty that borrows from different people and cultures in order to resist the white beauty as an iconic center. Major contemporary influences include Lee, Quede; Yasumasa Yorimura; Tunji Adeyini-Jones; and Sara Anstis. Historical artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and Gauguin also made a strong impression in my young self. My art manifests as a colorful vision of a cis man becoming a woman, and it exists on the middle ground of ambiguity in which I constantly pursue femininity on the canvas yet I never arrive in reality.