My paintings seek beauty through aesthetic balance and honest emotion. Curiously, my studio practice has led me to pursue two aesthetics. One aesthetic is largely abstract and non-objective, and is created predominantly with pastels and other dry pigments. These begin as charcoal rubbings from which I tease out pleasing forms and rhythms until I arrive at a sense of balance. The other contains motifs of disembodied limbs that have been whipped into a frenzy of oil, wax and dust that slowly reveals the presence of other bodily bits - the brain, a vagina, a sphenoid bone - that are themselves wells of physiological mysteries and primordial myth.

Drawing influence from other diasporic Chinese like Zao Wuo-Ki and Wu Guanzhong, I am similarly driven to find a visual language that merges the aesthetics of two worlds on the way to the sublime. These processes reflect myself, a person of two parts, drawing from concepts and ideas about how we think and live in Chinese and Western philosophical schools of thought

Yanqing Low is a painter who lives and paints in New York City. She holds an MFA from The New York Academy of Art. Her work is a part of multiple collections, and has been shown in Singapore and New York. She was recently part of ‘Eye-to-Eye’, a group show at the New York Academy of Art that was a joint curation between Jonathan Travis and NYAA students.