The painter Angela Wei has been making waves in the New York art world. Quite literally, a piece from her most recent series from 2024 titled “Navigator” depicts a merwoman riding a wave on a shell. In October, she had her solo show in New York, she sold works at the world’s leading auction house Christie’s, and was included in a group show at New York’s esteemed Rachel Uffner Gallery. Van Der Plas Gallery will show her work in December.
Wei’s visually dense figurative painting style of cute characters in stylized environments evokes the Japanese superflat (think Murakami) while engaging with the Japanese cultural phenomenon of kawaii, which, in her words, “emphasizes cuteness and childlike innocence as a way of concealing more disruptive messages within seemingly innocuous imagery.” We caught up with the Chinese-born Canadian New York-based painter on the heels of her latest solo show at The Gallery in Bushwick.
“Expressing myself creatively feels completely natural,” Wei commented on her approach to painting. After college, Wei worked in fashion as a writer and has written for internationally renowned magazines like ELLE Canada, Architectural Digest, and Fashionista. She was able to enter the art world seamlessly through her writing as a contributor to Christie’s editorial arm. There, she has written about everything from Hermés Kelly bags to 21st-century art.
“As I became more involved in the art world — attending gallery openings and participating in a few group shows early on — I realized that pursuing art as a full-time career was not only possible but worth chasing,” she commented. Her maternal side of the family is populated by artists and creatives — an oil painter, graphic designer, and architect — so choosing the career path had some precedent.
“I spent my high school years in the Pacific Northwest, so nature has always been a profound source of inspiration in my work. I find it to be both healing but also terrifying — it’s equally a place of refuge but also where I can recognize my insignificance. I think this tension is reflected in a lot of my works, where beautiful flora and fauna take on impish, even sinister expressions,” she remarked on her relationship with nature.
Wei grew up in Ottawa and moved to Vancouver in her teens. There, she was able to convene with others from the Chinese diaspora. “When I moved to Vancouver for high school, it felt like a culture shock. Vancouver has a very high Asian population, and all of a sudden about 50% of the kids at my school were Chinese,” she says.
Even though she spoke Mandarin at home and visited China every summer, while she lived in the white suburbs of Ottawa, she just felt like everyone else. Vancouver opened the door to her Chinese-ness and popular Asian Culture — from K-Pop to Hotpot, she became more aware of what was around her that was inspired by Asian culture. She realized that her Chinese grandparents’ artmaking was tied to the multi-century-old traditions of Chinese bird-and-flower paintings and calligraphy, for instance.
“Today, elements of my heritage are woven into my work through motifs like lotus flowers, chariot carts, and Taihu rocks, bridging my personal history with my artistic practice,” she explained.
Wei creates images in digital software that she then projects and paints with acrylic paints. She has an uncanny and impressive way of mixing references — from Alice in Wonderland to Adam and Eve. However, she is shifting away from the flat surface that acrylic often can lead to as she experiments with textures created through sponges, gradients, and layering on top with mediums like oil pastel. “I want my works to move in a more painterly direction and less constricting,” she explains.
“Cuteness is ultimately a defense mechanism against realities that would be harder to digest had they been represented literally,” she comments on her cartoon-like paintings with hallucinatory and otherworldly elements. Wei is an anxious person (aren’t we all?), but humor keeps her afloat. Often, darkness and comedy go hand in hand.
“She is a very thoughtful and purposeful painter at the same time that she is playful and tongue in cheek,” Lucy Liu, Associate Director at Rachel Uffner and founder of Loft 121, said about Wei. Liu believes strongly in the rising young artist as she curated Wei into her exhibition Arcus at Rachel Uffner in August and one of her Loft 121 shows. “These characteristics will take her a long way as she continues to develop her practice.” I couldn’t agree more.
To see more of Angela Wei’s work, follow her on Instagram.
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Alexandra Israel is a contributor to Grit Daily, a freelance arts writer and publicist. A museum aficionado since her introduction to Jean Dominque Ingres’ portraits as a small child, she enjoys spending her free time at museums and finding off-the-beaten-track gallery shows. She is a regular contributor to the art publication Cultbytes. With her finger on the pulse, Alexandra has been working in PR for over seven years, primarily within book publishing and in the art world. She has held positions at Penguin Book Group, Aperture Foundation, and Third Eye. Alexandra graduated from Bates College in 2010.