Curating my own exhibition of Finding The Most Beautiful
26 March 2020, amidst Covid-19 pandemic without visiting audience

My hope in presenting this body of work is to take the audience on my journey of finding the most beautiful. I want to provide my perspective of beauty for the target audience, which is women. However, the exhibition allows the general audience to see the power of believing in their own and others’ beauty. The artworks are presented in an arrangement that leads the audience to understand the journey from chapter one to three of delving into beauty in different subject matters from various angles.

 

Initially, I intended to convey the understanding of traditional ideas of beauty through different cultures and times. In the beginning of the exhibition, I want to introduce the understanding of perfection and imperfection to the audience by exploring the identities of women that have not been acknowledged as beautiful in society. I depicted African American woman identity using techniques of value and texture building in The Blood Diamond to beautify women of race. Using the same techniques of realism, color attributes are used to emphasize on inner beauty in personalities of five impactful women in Sincerely You. With this positioning of the introductory phase, the audience sees a connection between the two realistic depictions of women – despite being perfect, beauty includes imperfectness. Although the rough and imprecise textures would make the audience feel unpleasant, I intend the audience to consider beauty in the women’s unique identities through a colorful and united composition.

 

Continuing exploration of beauty in imperfections, I proceed to showcase more personal artworks. To inspire reflection of beauty in the audience’s self, I needed to accept mine. I want to encourage the audience to respond and feel the same way with their imperfections. Intended to represent my state of mind truthfully, I painted Translucency of the textile over the body realistically with oil to symbolize embracing and securing my own body imperfections. By symbolizing my progressing story through capturing in-the-moment images of color flow and textile movements on Red Chiffon, the audience can learn from my personal experience of self-acceptance. They can see the changes I have encountered as I respond to my different imperfections and struggles, such as illustrating my frustration of following society’s clothing etiquettes through manipulating the school uniform silhouette with deconstruction technique in Dominance to touch on student identities as well. By arranging these artworks in one section, the audience can be moved to consider how seeing imperfections in ourselves can be positive, then take ownership in their identity.

 

After encouraging the audience to embrace their identity, I am taking my audience to see their own beauty through versatile representations of the body through the use of rule of odds. Universal artworks are placed towards the end of the exhibition to empower diverse beauty in the audience. I drifted away from focusing on specific identities because I wanted more applicability for the audience to be the ones who see themselves in the artworks. I studied body imperfections owned by five anonymous women with the technique of abstract textile painting with gouache used to emphasize on the beauty in ambiguous patterns and textures in Seeing the Unseen. Wanting to confront the body type standards that exist in the society, I realized that embodying the abstract body shapes is stronger than mimicking it realistically. I equally painted the symbol of five bodies in All of Your Curves and Edges from front view with the technique of breaking down the actual form into geometric shapes for the audience to reflect on their perspective on their own body. I want the audience to feel appreciated, reminding them that body standards are not as important as their individual beauty.

 

The middle space is transformed into an installation of five body forms with a range of skin tones so that it can be perceived from different interpretations and perspectives by the audience, depending on where the audience views it from. As a finale, the installation summarizes my initial intentions and purposes in making my artworks, creating a metaphoric understanding on the audience about how standards have constrained us from finding beauty in ourselves. Through non-realistic and representational body figures following the audience around, they should feel invited to love and accept themselves.