29" x 44" x 1"

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Depicting a time that never was. Before COVID, my family planned to return to China to visit relatives and friends (the women here, who I painted to look as if they were my age). 

However, these plans never came to fruition as the days trickled into months of quarantine, and I’ve never gone back to visit my family since– I was in middle school. I’m now a graduating senior. 

Thus, I attempted to create a fuzzy, nostalgic, and almost surrealistic atmosphere. The words are excerpted from my diary at the time, and the red string is meant to be a humanoid figure, a depiction of myself within it all. 

 

I integrated digital and traditional art, painting the piece using oils, scanning and adding on to it digitally, and then reprinting it. I transferred this print to another surface using gel matte medium, rubbing away portions to create a rough texture. This "skin" was then layered with the other materials.