Jessica Wee American/ Canadian

As a diasporic Asian artist of Korean origin who has lived in Canada, France, Italy, and the U.S., I have always had a complex relationship to the notion of cultural identity. Discontinuity from a sense of “homeland” has impelled me to negotiate my own ways of being in the present. In my art, I create worlds constituted of fragmented memories and identities where I inhabit multiple characters and places all at once.

My practice uses traditional mediums like painting and drawing to create surreal dreamscapes containing free-flowing elements like hybrid creatures and anthropomorphic plants. Magical and playful, yet touched with uncanny darkness, these unreal environments allow me to collapse the distance between the different worlds of my experience.  

During my academic training in Italy, I spent four years studying Old Masters’ techniques, immersed in the artifacts of Western/European art history. Recently, I have returned to some of my earlier experiments with automatic drawing and fantastical landscapes, combining those  approaches with influences from Renaissance painting while exploring a process that involves new 2-D and 3-D digital techniques. Working with an expanded archive of images found online, I use CGI modelling to lend a sheen of realism to enigmatic compositions of multilayered pastiche, suspended somewhere between touchscreens and dreams.

Working simultaneously with the dualities between the historic and the contemporary, Euro-Western and pan-Asian, I engage playfully with the question of where I am now. Connecting different pasts and futures in non-linear temporality, I aim to open a zone for imagination in which the viewer can contemplate their own narrative.