A Chinese-American, queer artist and educator with audio-visual synesthesia, J-Wo recommitted to a studio practice about twelve years ago after recognizing that what they had long experienced as sound-as-image was a way of seeing worth following. The work is an invitation to connection — to the earth, to each other, and to a more deliberate way of living.
J-Wo makes paintings that hold beauty and dread in the same frame. Working in oil on canvas and wood, they use bold color, gradients, and pattern to translate the natural world — sunsets, desert expanses, seasonal blooms, the architecture of trees — into compositions that also carry the weight of climate anxiety, late-stage capitalism, and social fracture.