A Womb (Just Like You)

Oil, acrylic, watercolor, and ink

January 2018


Here I Am, Tied to You

Oil, Ink, Acrylic, and Watercolor


18" x 24"

Generations - My Body Remembers You

Mixed media on silk


41" x 70"

To Leave Behind an Empty Shell 

Watercolor, ink, and acrylic


18" x 24"

Mothers (Series of 2)

 Watercolor and porcelain slip

 8" x 10" each

Origins: It Feels Different With You Here, consists of abstracted spaces that work to create both a sense of intimacy with the viewer and self-reflective environments focusing on the concept of consanguinity and a sense of personal origin. The spaces created layer figurative imagery or text over shifting backgrounds that evoke the sense of water and fluidity. This fluid space references the flux of identity linked to origin while simultaneously acting as a protective barrier to the ideas expressed. In these pieces, Eva asks the question, "Where are you from?" In response, the titles of each work are important aspects of each piece. Some of them answer the question in a vague way – "A Womb (just like you)", while others require more interaction with the piece – "Here is the Land I am From".
    Despite working around a seemingly easy to answer question – Where are you from?, the artist aims to complicate this inquiry to the point of abstraction and incoherence. By obscuring a sense of recognizable space or location, the work aims to dislocate and create the sensation of ambiguous origin. Although some materials used – silk and porcelain, attempt to engage with the artist's birth country - China, she does so in a way that focuses on materiality and ignores traditional use and style. In this sense, the objects and paintings also take on an ambiguous origin (much like ourselves), are they from where the original materials were made or from where they were created into art pieces? Having traveled through the world, how can one pinpoint their exact origin or arrival into being?  
    Much of the imagery in this body of work references the fetus in utero. Whether literally showing the fetus or recalling the amniotic fluid that surrounds and protects it, the pieces utilize this relationship to gestation in order to explore a more complicated sense of origin. 
    Within a larger context, Eva aims to consider the creation of the individual while acknowledging complicated group identities in terms of social, racial, and cultural origin. More specifically, as one of the thousands of girls adopted from China, she examines personal origin from this viewpoint and considers how origin can be more complicated than simply a geographic location.

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