Yung An's Painted Feasts
Yung An's Mary and Her Roommates
Yung An is a queer artist whose creative practice is expressed primarily through painting. She is Taiwan-born, and Montreal-based, and has been working with therapeutic perspectives expressed via mix medium arts.
According to Yung An, "Pink, as the color we can sense with our eyes, will be used when I am ready to fully expose the most vulnerable side of myself. It feels like a fluffy and intangible uterus-like organ that breathes consistently, or like a baby hedgehog, and it shares the deepest intimacy with you and points out the spines while the connection is deprived."
Her works demonstrate isolated humanity, curated from personal experience. The concept of "feasts" contains the essence of her practice, with her two primary projects being Feast of Spring and Feast of Summer. The former series inspires the latter. According to Yung An, “Every ecstatic moment should be addressed as our own feast, and should be expressed through art.”
Yung An's Core I
Feast of Spring includes paintings, illustration, and poetry, but today we are featuring her painted work. Early on in the process of creating this series, Yung An worked primarily in figurative painting from 2013 to 2015. The series tackles her biological gender identity as female and transforms into non-binary and queer identities. She not only explores her sexual orientation through painting, but also through performance. These practice methods have provided Yung An with a deeper understanding of the balance of the gender boundaries she holds for herself, as well as offering a way to blur the Asian male-dominated lens in painting.
Feast of Summer digs deep into roots of Yung An's synesthetic experience, and has developed as an abstract painting series.
Yung An's Oreiou
Yung An uses this experience to explore the imposed binaries of nationality, gender, and especially her own perception of social identity. The series develops a therapeutic perspective for Yung An’s work that refines her personal connection with the arts.
Stayed tuned for Yung An's upcoming project focusing on semi-utopia, which she describes as a “contemporary guide to living on the earth.” It is an illustrative autobiography that continues the Feast of Spring series. The series features the journey of an Asian woman as she begins to feel comfortable with her queerness, and embraces her inner balance of gender identity at the age of 25. This is achieved through reflection upon art-making in Taiwan, and her adolescent struggle with gender and social identities.