Artist Statement

As a person who came from a different cultural tradition, my art is an on-going investigation and exploration of my Diaspora experience living in America. My mother tongue and my adopted English language are not blended into some cognitive catalog of resonant or complementary notions. My work reflects a fusion, a unique blend of the contemporary American culture and a faraway tradition in the East. My perspective derives from the similarities and uniqueness of disparate traditions. I am a person of the East and of the West. However, I am also neither Western or Eastern. I am a typical citizen of the modern world hoping to make work that speaks for a common experience of interstitial identity through art.

Biography

Born in 1953 in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, Brenda Louie is a California-based multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited in regional, national and international museums and galleries since the late 1980s including the Monterey Museum of Art, Oceanside Museum of Art, Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, Nelson Art Gallery at the University of California in Davis, Institute for East Asian Studies Gallery at University of California Berkeley, Art Department Gallery at the State College at Trenton in New Jersey and Jack Olson Gallery in Northern Illinois University at DeKalb, as well as Zhejiang Art Museum in Hangzhou and Art and Design Gallery in Ningbo University, P.R. China.

Louie holds a Master of Arts in Painting from California State University Sacramento (1991) and a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in Visual Arts (1993). While at Stanford, she received training under esteemed contemporary artists such as David Hannah, the late Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobdell. She was the recipient of the Gorden Hampton Fellowship, the Robert Mondavi Fellowship, and the San Francisco Foundation’s Edwin A. and Adalaine B. Cadogan Scholarship as well as awards and honors from Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commissions.

Her work is housed in private and public collections in the United States, China, and the Middle East, notably the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, Wickland Oil Company in California, University of California in Davis, China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Art Museum in Hangzhou, Ningbo University in Zhejiang, P. R. China. Louie is a faculty member of the Art Department at California State University in Sacramento, where she has taught studio art since 1996. She was an visiting artist at the Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, and Normal University in Hangzhou, China.

Louie’s artistic practice is based on continuous experimentation and research, drawing from a wide range of sources, often regarding themes that reflect her diverse history. Prior to immigrating to the United States as an adolescent, she lived between a rural town in southeast China and Hong Kong and studied classical Chinese literature and calligraphy under her father, Lui Chiu Sheung, a Chinese scholar and calligrapher, while also training in Chinese brush painting under leading contemporary Chinese Painting Lingnan Master Au Ho-Nien. She immigrated to the United States in 1972 and earned her BA degree in Economics before rekindling her lifelong interest in aesthetics. Although her formative years in China were steeped in its centuries-old visual culture and traditional artistic practices, in the United States she was drawn to the fluid and spontaneous brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. While she was a graduate student in California State University in Sacramento, she studied action and gesture painting under mentors Oliver Jackson and Joan Moment. Through the lessons of American art movements, she began to work in conceptually driven approaches that emphasize the intellectual and philosophical connections of her bicultural training in painting. Consequently, she has become increasingly engaged in exploring diasporic narratives, frequently recalling her own experiences of a childhood spent amidst the sociopolitical turmoil and hardship that led to China’s 1961 famine, which spurred her migration at a young age.

Movement from Zero, the Art of Brenda Louie, a monograph on the work of Louie’s work, was published by the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, P.R. China in 2016 with essays by art historians, artist and art critics, Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker (Mills College of Oakland), Elaine O’Brien, M.L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati (California State University in Sacramento), Chris Daubert (Sacramento City College), Shaker Laibi, (University of Gabes, Tunisia), and Farid Zahi (University of Rabat, Morocco). A revised second edition of the monograph will be available on Amazon.com in Fall 2019. Moving from Zero, the Art of Brenda Louie has been translated from English to Chinese, Arabic and French will be posted online and available on CD format as part of the monograph.