Angela Yu

My body of work is based on three themes: social issues, hope, and childhood. These three themes more like the three stages of growing up: wounding, healing, and recovering. I try to explore my three themes in several ways - by doing a lot of searching on the internet for social problems, or stages of injury, watching videos of victims of these social problems; by observing people around me to understand how to heal mentally, and by remembering some funny things in the childhood. Because my themes are all about people and psychology, I incorporate portraits in all my artworks. Most of the portraits are realistic, but there are also attempts at caricature. I start by searching a lot of artworks online to find some inspirations that can collide with my own themes. I also take photos to use as my reference images. This combination will give me the foundation to start creating.

My two paintings on the theme of social issues, or stages of injury, Depression and Cyber Violence, were inspired by two illustrators, Jamsan and Oritakeikou. Jarmsan’s dark fairy tale series was my inspiration for Depression. The dark fairy tale series creates a scary feeling with freehand lines and simple compositions, which I apply to the evil black hands in my artwork. Oritakeikou's drawing style strongly influenced the look of the portraits in Cyber Violence. The caricature style is chosen because it is too cruel to turn words into weapons to hurt people, and the unrealistic nature of the caricature is just right for the dark side. I used a dark color palette to express both of them in an exaggerated figurative way, hoping to make the audience understand the horror of these social problems, to understand the feelings of the victims, and to do what they can to alleviate these two social problems.

My second theme of three paintings is based on the theme of hope, Hope: By Ear, Hope: By Eye, Hope: By Mouth, all inspired by a Society6 T-shirt print, Inner Beauty, whose color scheme, mono and color, fits perfectly with my theme. The color scheme, mono and color, fits my theme, so I incorporated this element into my work. People without hope like using a monochrome filter, are lifeless. Color is like hope, it gives them hope. I have divided the Hope series into three stages. The first stage, By Ear, represents listening and getting hope from others. Here I use the butterfly to represent hope, coming to the still lifeless people and bringing one hope. The second stage, By Eye, means to see, to learn to find hope by oneself. One can begin to find beauty and find hope by oneself. In this stage, I have flowing colors to represent hope. The last stage, By Mouth, means that one begins to convey hope to others and give them comfort. Here I chose flowers to represent hope, showing that the person is like a flower that brings pleasure to others. 

The theme of my last two pieces is childhood, or the healing stage. Characters in Bubble Blowing Girl and Squashing On the Glass are doing something that people did as children. Bubble Blowing Girl was inspired by a painting from a Korean drama (Her Private Life), the bright palette collides with the bubbles. I took its bubble element and replaced the original toy element with flowers. Bright tones give the whole painting a fresh and dreamy feeling. Squashing On the Glass was inspired by Rut Mackel' s 'The Ugly Truth' photos, which reminded me of my childhood squishing my face to the glass. It is painted in an impressionistic style. The association of these two paintings with the theme of healing is not a request for people to do these things, but rather to think about whether they remember the true self when they grow up, and treat people with sincerity without masks on. I hope the audience can heal themselves and reconcile with themselves in my Exhibition show.