My work explores the process of salvaging lost materials, identities, and stories. These salvaged subjects encompass the female, the ill, the non-white, and the not-straight — the monstrous “other” according to some traditional Western art. Using paintings, drawings, and prints, I combine images of the monstrous with the human and the divine to reflect on the hybrid qualities that make up a living being’s identity.
My salvaged work is constructed using diverse media, ranging from dark inks, graphite, and charcoal to light paints and wax that evoke the complexity of my chimeric subject matter. I draw on medical illustrations, depictions of monsters in fables and myths about West and the fantastical Orient, and images of women by largely forgotten female comic artists. I bring to the spotlight figures that have been disregarded in favor of the godlike fair man, prized in classical Western art and modern American mainstream media. I reveal that the seeming objectivity of realistic representational art is an illusion made of strokes of paint, lines of ink, and pencil marks. It is particularly relevant to me as an artist who has inhabited the monster’s separate space – being a woman, an experiencer of illness, and a mixed race third generation immigrant in America – to use representational art as a mode of confronting and breaking down what has been labelled as the other, to rescue it from the dark, and to make it human.
Kera Ling is a Chicago-based artist who creates a diverse body of drawings, paintings, and artist books exploring the ideas of compassion and interconnection. She deconstructs notions of the monster related to bodies that are marginalized due to illness, gender identity, race, and other factors. In her position as Vice President of ArtHelpsHeal, she shares her art and skills to engage young art students who create art to empower and connect.
