About the art
My name is Grace Ren and I am a 23-year-old artist living and working in Baltimore, MD. I have long been interested in the Asian Pasifika Arts Collective and its mission to build a community of AAPI creatives as we find and lose and then find again our identities and purposes through our art.
In both my roles as an Asian American and an Asian American artist, I have often felt out of place, like something in me was not conforming to what others were doing and what I was expected to do. Several phases of my life have been marked by this strange feeling and while I have come to conclude that it may not necessarily be due to the two aforementioned identities, they are the two that I feel guiding my work the most. To me, feeling out of place is not a bad thing at all, and in fact, I believe it can create a beautiful scene, which is the driving force behind the three artworks I have submitted today. I am both nervous but excited to share my art with the rest of the AAPI community through this contest and I am also looking forward to learning about other wonderfully talented AAPI creatives in the area.
Being Asian in America is a unique experience that I don’t think one artist (or person in general) can encapsulate in its entirety. That’s why I think events like this are so important, by bringing together so many of us, a more complete narrative begins to form, and our voices and stories are not just heard but felt on a spiritual and emotional level. I am sure many can understand this idea of feeling oddly out of place, but I also hope that through my art, AAPI people viewing it can see how special of an experience ‘Feeling out of place’ can be.
About the Artist
Grace Ren graduated from Johns Hopkins University in May 2020 with a B.A. in public health studies and a minor in visual arts. For a long time, she struggled with reconciling these two fields she dedicated her education to and has often felt like there can only be one or the other. Recently though, she realized that the ability to visually communicate a story or a feeling is important for many places other than a museum. Public health is all about the transfer and applicability of knowledge to society and throughout her career as an artist, she noticed that art has always served as a common, humanizing tool. simply put, it is the path to human empathy and radical social change.
Depending on when you ask, she lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, and Seattle, Washington.
For Inquiries or Commissions, head to their website!
