Yellow Flowers

Featured “American Born Chinese” (Disney+) and “Awkwafina is Nora from Queens” (Comedy Central).

This piece was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, with flowers including orchids, plumerias, marigolds, lotus flowers, and cherry blossoms, all of which are used in various Asian cultures to symbolize different emotions and stages in life.

Van Gogh enjoyed painting these flowers (some were gifts for Gaugin) and wrote that they represented gratitude for him. He was able to create such intense vibrancy with the yellows through newly manufactured pigments like chrome yellow. He layered on the paint as a way to express emotion, and with the yellow - it was meant to convey a strong feeling of happiness, with the various flower shapes representing different phases of its life. I chose to recreate this work because of the yellow, a color that carries a racist undertone with East Asians, and reclaim its vibrancy.

This piece of part my Asian American Still Lifes series, where I reimagined well-known still lifes with commonplace objects found around Asian American homes, particularly East Asian households. I explored how representation can extend to objects and evoke different memories and emotions.