6 AAPI Women Artists You Should Know (March 2023)
You’ve probably heard of artists like Yayoi Kusama or Yoko Ono, and maybe you’ve heard of Pan Yuliang, Shirin Neshat, or Lee Bul from our previous posts. Here we introduce to you 6 important AAPI women artists who are painting narratives for today’s generation, and who may well emerge as icons for the current era in just a decade or two.
1. Dominique Fung (b. 1987)
Based in: New York
Known for: her otherworldly surrealist compositions that bear tie-ins to reality through recognisable ‘Asian’ motifs. Responding to the thematic questions raised in theories of orientalism and ornamentalism à la Anne Anlin Cheng, Fung’s paintings tell stories behind the secret lives of objects as characters-in-themselves, or in other words, objectified characters.
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2. Sasha Gordon (b. 1998)
Based in: New York
Known for: vibrant and expressive figurative paintings, often of herself or a doppelgänger, and almost always infused with her personal experiences as biracial Asian woman. Honest and raw, her work explores themes of self-image, racial prejudice, the female body, and the male gaze.
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3. Anna Park (b. 1996)
Based in: New York
Known for: her distinct style of using gradations of charcoal greyscale to depict life through the lens of her alter-ego character. Reflecting the ‘frenzied contemporary experience’, her work is lined with a dark humour that casts the viewer as voyeur, thrust into a myriad of different environments.
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4. Lily Wong (b. 1989)
Based in: New York
Known for: portrait-esque explorations of what it means to be a person – and what kinds of structures shape personal experiences of pain, intimacy, and desire. In her paintings you’ll find emotional and saturated landscapes with elements of fantasy, drama, and dissociation between the external world and private mind.
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5. Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984)
Based in: New York
Known for: her rich images drawing together diverse media, myths, histories, geopolitical realities, and cultural allusions. If you feel tense or unsettled after looking at her work, you’re doing it right – informed by the coalescence of practices from printmaking to Vietnamese lacquer painting, lesser-known narratives from the past come alive in Nguyen’s present-day re-imaginings and explore possibilities of the future.
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6. Amanda Ba (b. 1998)
Based in: London and New York
Known for: fusing critical race and queer theory into surrealist tableaus of underworlds that are sometimes conceived of as nasty, brutish, and short. Symbolism found throughout much of her work include the use of a striking red — with its may layers of meaning — and dogs, specifically the American Bully. Her paintings also thematically respond to conceptual frameworks of posthumanism, Otherness, and diasporic memory.
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