Building on these concerns, my recent work expands into women’s health and wellbeing. In my ongoing series Maternity Journey, I depict the physical and emotional realities of motherhood, drawing from my own postpartum experience. The series challenges sanitized aesthetics in both contemporary visual culture and art history, including the pressure to quickly return to a pre-pregnancy body promoted on Chinese social media, and the pain-free Madonna and Child imagery embedded in Western tradition. Through large scale figurative oil paintings that confront idealized depictions of the maternal body, I reclaim motherhood as a site of vulnerability, strength, and transformation.
Alongside these works, I am developing a group of small traditional egg tempera paintings depicting my daughter while she sleeps. Their quiet, peaceful surface contrasts with the intensity of the larger paintings, while pointing to a lived truth, that the brief moments when a child is asleep can be the only time a mother can pause, breathe, and reflect.
Created in the context of growing reproductive healthcare restrictions in Texas, where I live and work, Maternity Journey functions as visual advocacy for bodily autonomy and maternal visibility.
