Rayna Li, True Stories Where I Almost Met Death Before the Age of Six, First Image in a Suite of Four, 2022
Mixed media on canvas
16 x 16 in
My practice as a mixed media artist explores difficult aspects of my personal and cultural identity through staging subtle interactions between traditional and unusual materials. I am fascinated by how an image’s intricately worked surface is capable of narrating its own stories with or without interventions from the piece’s iconography, or in the presence or absence of a figurative subject or legible context. Though the works in my portfolio are inspired by a diversity of sources — classical Chinese poetry, current political events, and childhood memories — they are linked by a similar focus on materiality and the effect of sensory overload. Layers of painstakingly laid marks contend for the viewer’s attention in an arena that is the work’s surface, and it is through this constant struggle in the sensory realm that I convey a psychological atmosphere of draining anxiety.
My current series True Stories Where I Almost Met Death Before the Age of Six is a suite of four images that came out of my negotiation with traumatic childhood memories. While each image is directly inspired by a true event that I can name and tell, it is also a self-critique that challenges the very credibility of my personal narrative. Inspired by Elizabeth Loftus’s psychological study on false memory creation, I employed the visual vocabularies of surrealism and body horror to emphasize the impressionability of the young mind and the shocking intensity with which it perceives pain and grief. Through my manipulation of found images and articulated textures, I gave shape to the stories that haunt me, so that I may begin to process them in a different light.