My residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, a space initiated by women artists, served as a vital opportunity to deepen my creative context, cultural perspective, and gender discourse. During this time, I focused on the cultural, mythological, and ecological narratives of the American Southwest, examining cross-cultural representations of mother goddesses, relationships to land, and cosmologies. Through ink on paper, scrolls, and books, I developed a visual language centered on the female body and female agency.

The ideas explored during this residency laid the conceptual groundwork for my subsequent solo exhibitions in the United States, in particular how female figures are reassembled and reinterpreted in contemporary contexts. Drawing on psychology and traditional mythology, the works reflect on archetypal images of female vitality. I revisited how patriarchal and colonial histories have broken apart previously unified portrayals of women and female deities - beings originally encompassing light and darkness - by casting powerful goddesses as threatening figures. Referencing spiritual symbols such as the Corn Mother, Moon Goddess, and the Coyote of the Americas, I transformed desert plants and animals into patterns in ink-wash backgrounds. These visual elements formed a narrative that merges nature, ecology, and a feminine perspective, resulting in a series of works that reimagine women’s roles.

During this time, I visited Joshua Tree National Park in California and several national parks in Utah, seeking to understand the region’s deep-rooted relationship between land and life. I also traveled across the American Southwest to expand my artistic and professional network, initiating collaborative exchanges with local art institutions and curators. Supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the National Culture and Arts Foundation, I became the first Taiwanese artist invited to present solo exhibitions at both Material, an art space in Utah, and Ogden Contemporary Arts Center. These exhibitions were additionally supported by several major U.S. art funding organizations, including the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. While in residence, I developed a curatorial research project with Utah-based curator Jorge Rojas, Pacific Islanders in the Desert, which received funding from the National Culture and Arts Foundation for my 5-month field study in Utah. The resulting international exhibition project Currents of the Soul is slated to open at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art in 2027.

Author: Lu Wei
Edited: Brix