Artist Statement: Correlation
Rent from DeepDyve- Artist Statement:Correlation
All the world is a stage.
—Shakespeare
My work reflects the influences of the history of Western art, Chinese folk art, and traditional Chinese painting. I intend to create free-formed imagery patterns and incorporate them into my artwork to evoke diverse personalities. My goal is to achieve an open-ended conceptual narration, fusing personal expression with shared social and cultural spaces, while leaving room for viewers to bring their own experiences and imaginations to the images.
In my recent work I create spaces taken from the world in which we live. In the process of making art, I explore visual elements across time and space. The challenge for me is to build an abstract narrative structure that has different levels of trigger points in association with our lives, thoughts, memories, and imaginations.
After a long process of thinking and sketching, I found that fragmented body images are richer and more stimulating than full figures. I decided to reduce images of human bodies to dancing and otherwise moving legs. The suggested upper-body interplay with abstract gestures opens a space for viewers to fill in their own thoughts and imaginations. Legs are not only beautiful in themselves but also represent life and energy. They are organic transportation tools as well. The fragmented representational and abstract details intertwine with other iconic images, creating a new narrative in seen and unseen space.
My goal is to leave a mental space for viewers to fill in. I want my work to provide a chance to see things from different perspectives, rather than to offer a predictable reading.
View more of Leah Wong's work at www.leahwong.com. [End Page 1]
Leah L. Wong was born in Qingdao (Tsingtao), China. She studied oil painting at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, where she was the only female student in her department. After earning her BFA degree, she taught painting and drawing at Donghua University and then the Shanghai Theater Academy, both in Shanghai. She came to the United States in 1993 and earned an MFA in painting from Ohio University in Athens in 2004. Her award-winning paintings have been exhibited in group and solo shows nationally and internationally. Her paintings are found in numerous private and corporate collections. She is represented by Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus, Ohio. In 2011 she was interviewed by Hong Kong's Asian Art Archive about her involvement in China's contemporary art movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s. View the interview online at http://www.china1980s.org/en/interview_detail.aspx?interview_id=103.
