Monica Ren

Engaging both sensorial experiences of physical space and memories of mental space, my work examines what it means to inhabit a woman’s body–a moving and thinking body. To me, possessing a corporeal body, leaving indexical marks in the fleeting moments and tracing how body moves in time and space is intimate and empowering. Taking a phenomenological approach, I use my body to experience, address the significance of things in consciousness, and embody emotion and imagination. In turn, I am interested in how my body’s presence, absence, placement, displacement, and relationship with other entities mold my existence in space.

After rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own recently, I have been dwelling on the necessity of a literal and figurative space for women creatives to make work and construct their own artistic history. I began to rethink what it means to have a “room,” a bounded space, for my creative impulses concerning the phenomenological experience of my body–an Asian woman’s body of intersectionality. My concern with the “room” and my body is multilayered. I explore both the physical and metaphorical rooms–my studio or creative built environment around me, the body as a room defined by its interiority and exteriority, and memory as an infinite room with its regenerative and reconstructive potentials. My paintings also enable me to meditate on and exteriorize the authenticity and performativity of my experience, which is inextricably linked to social categorizations of gender and sexuality. Noticing how I position and perform through my body, I paint myself, both the physical and the emotional, in these material and psychological spaces, inviting an embodied phenomenological experience. Questioning the dynamic between private memory and public experience, I desire to address and reimagine a literal and figurative “feminine” space for unbounded creation to locate my body.

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