Magnificence & Chaos
Painting
2019-2020
Growing up in the age of social media, I sometimes feel powerless as I surf the untamed waters of blinking pixels, flashing images, and shifting interfaces, pulling me every which way beneath the undertow. After I realized how detrimental social media is to my mental well-being, I decided to create paintings to explore my conflicted relationship with media, documenting my inner struggles as a teenager trapped in the social media maelstrom. Inspired by pop art portraitist Andy Warhol, I seek to do for social media what he’d done for popular culture, revealing both social media's magnificence and its chaos.
01
Tears
17.9'' x 15.0''
acrylic on gesso covered wood board
2020
My monochromatic, glum portrait contrasts with the neon stripes that resemble “glitching” tears streaming down my face, symbolizing my desperation and inner fatigue due to pressure from social media.
Digital Mask
13.4'' x 23.5''
acrylic on gesso covered wood board
2020
02
Social media's captivating, vibrant mask hides most of life's dreary realities, as represented by my portrait's two-toned face.
03
Compression
21.3'' x 15.6''
gouache, acrylic, and marker on card paper
2019
One-point linear perspective emphasizes the composition's focal point, where my portrait, done in the colorful & sectioned WPAP style, reveals my fragmented emotions due to constant influxes of opinions and information from social media.
04
Blinded
15.8'' x 15.8''
acrylic on gesso covered wood board
2019
"Pixels“, made using a hand-carved grid stencil, surround a monochromatic portrait that reveals my numbness, confusion, and blindness due to being engrossed in the digital world full of constant clashing stimuli.
05
10.2'' x 31.5''
acrylic on gesso covered wood board
2019
Eyepiece
My black-and-white portrait gradually merges with a vibrant gradient of pixels, reflecting my identity merging with the digital world around me. A green "pixel" that covers one of my abnormally large eyes symbolizes my inclination to see the world through lens created by digital media.
06
Void
15.8'' x 15.8''
acrylic on gesso covered wood board
2019
My personas on social media merge with my personal identity, sucking the color and vibrancy out of the real me and leaving me fragmented and drifting in a flamboyant void.
07
Modern Zombie
15.8'' x 15.8''
acrylic, gel pen, and ink on gesso covered wood board
2020
Social media steals my attention and captivates my senses, manipulating me to wander about as if I have a malfunctioning mind. I meander aimlessly in a colorful yet chaotic digital world, staring at a display screen, going about daily life, or, more likely, both at the same time.