Lijuan McQuillan

ylj1@hotmail.com Website

Confluence

My paintings are an amalgamation of cultural clichés, elements from popular culture, literary references and historical imagery from both Eastern and Western society.

I bring together my past experience of growing up and living in China and my present experience of living in Ireland, integrating my sense of cultural heritage and my perspective as an outsider in another country.

This body of work consists of a series of realist oil paintings. My artistic process begins with digital photomontages, where I experiment by merging a range of personal photos and internet sourced images. These compositions are then developed into oil paintings of various scales that enact a form of hybridization in terms of composition, subject-matter and social commentary.

For instance, I started painting Social Media by focusing on a Tibetan herdsman boy who is the latest Chinese internet sensation. He became famous and dominated the social media for months through a 7 seconds’ video, whilst the news regarding 2020 Boston Dynamics robots was revealed to the Western world. I composed these two key elements with two figures who are browsing social media. Their interests are different but somehow their hands holding phones are crossing and overlapping to each other.

My work embraces cultural difference and, within these contexts, explores the increased political polarisation of East and West that occurred during the pandemic.