siang
by Kanya Abe
Artist's Statement:
This painting is a large scale work that manifested from my own personal reflections on culture, displacement and identity. The many figures represent characters I both know personally or generally through concepts derived from multiple facets of my life growing up in Bali. I wanted to create a "floating" sense of space as well as depict a stereotypically "primitive" setting full of leisure, heat and humidity at the height of a day in the tropics. The title "Siang" is a word indicative of the time of day, either noon or early afternoon, when the sun is at its peak.
This painting is a large scale work that manifested from my own personal reflections on culture, displacement and identity. The many figures represent characters I both know personally or generally through concepts derived from multiple facets of my life growing up in Bali. I wanted to create a "floating" sense of space as well as depict a stereotypically "primitive" setting full of leisure, heat and humidity at the height of a day in the tropics. The title "Siang" is a word indicative of the time of day, either noon or early afternoon, when the sun is at its peak.
Kanya Aiko Abe was born and grew up in Bali, Indonesia until she turned 15. She afterwards went to the Putney School in Vermont, where she studied art in conjunction with paradigms of nationality and cultural identity. She lives in the United States as a dual citizen and seeks to explore cultural environments and intersections through her image-making practice.