Spotlight Artist

Yuan Ge

MFA Annual
Artist profile photo

I’m a place you wandered

Surreal landscape with colorful human figures, abstract shapes, and fantasy scenery.

oil on canvas

The Insider

Surreal scene with swans, lily pads, and abstract blue-green shapes.

oil on canvas

Low Tide

Surreal painting of a curled figure surrounded by red tones, shells, and a large claw.

oil on canvas

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

 I found myself mesmerized by the mysterious beauty and complexities of the natural world; I also see the same qualities of vulnerability and power interwoven in the aesthetic of female forms. Inspired by the sanctity and power of water, I infuse fluid elements in my paintings to provoke a sense of fantasy, reminding people of brief moments when life felt like a series of dreamy encounters.

I paint in oil, which allows me to achieve a sense of healing and self-determining resolution through its variety and flexibility. My instinctive process reveals an imaginative energy through an accumulation of unreal colors and distorted forms that gradually fill the watersheds of time and space. I use abstract expression to endow a sense of space and emotion toward my work, theoretically avoiding the collisions of sexuality being compared to literal forms. Starting from secret, automatic drawings, I articulate for the familiar then fashion them into something strange—a creative experience I hope holds my audience in suspension so that they may reconsider their own personal struggles.

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