Seniors Emma Yung and Mirabelle Chi have joined the few hundred students yearly who receive perfect scores on their AP Art and Design exams. The class was assigned to ask themselves a question, and try to answer it through art.
Mirabelle Chi is an active member in the East community. She is captain of the girls’ wrestling team and is a part of the National Art Honor Society. Her love for art and family shines through in the art she created for her portfolio. Her question, “How can I explore the influence of Buddhist inspired values through a personal narrative?” embraces the broad topic of Buddhist culture, while tying in attributes to her personal life and relationships.
“I was the first child, so (my family) took a lot of pictures,” she said. Chi took inspiration from her childhood pictures. She recreated a few old images with her family, adding Buddhist symbolism to the background.
“The paintings were very easy to make because I liked [the question] so much, it didn’t feel like labor,” Chi said. She had no problem creating ideas for each of her pieces. The only issue Chi faced was the time crunch. “Art is on a pretty tight schedule, so I was trying to get all of these pieces done quickly,” she said. AP art students were given the entirety of the school year to complete five pieces, causing Chi to feel rushed.
She created only two pieces depicting her current self. One represents the idea, “You suffer when you’re separated from others, you’re happy you’re unified with others.” The other one presents “My appreciation of the surreal peace and calm felt when one is meditating and concentrating.” Chi’s work focuses on her relationship with Buddhism and how it affects her life, focusing on her relationships with her family and self.
As a member of the National Art Honor Society, one of East’s a cappella groups, and theater, Emma Yung has a passion for the arts. Her five pieces showcased the question “How has my girlhood shaped who I am now?” Yung asked herself how the universal experience of youth is perceived, and how being a young girl affected her femininity through the years.
Yung’s art uniquely answers this question with many of her pieces made through the eyes of a child. “I wanted to tackle what everyone thinks of when they think of childhood and girlhood initially,” she said. Her art hints at themes such as imagination, femininity, friendships, hopes and dreams in order to convey a general theme of youth and girlhood.
“Pink represents femininity. Light and shadow create depth and nostalgia.” Yung’s use of color in every piece is a contribution to the idea or emotion she is trying to display. In her nostalgic or soft pieces, she uses light colors like pink and white.
Yung’s art depicts scenes specific to her and her childhood while incorporating mainstream ideas of childhood. “It was focused on childhood and how it has impacted different parts of my identity,” she said. A piece showing her messy drawer from childhood is an ode to her old best friend. It displays old letters in a child’s handwriting. The picture also includes chapstick, flowers, pictures and bracelets that all give a child-like feeling to the art.
Yung takes some inspiration from Canadian artist Owen Rival.
“He does a lot of portraiture work with interesting color and lighting,” she said.
One of Young’s pictures is made in a similar style to Owens art. The piece shows a child version of Yung looking through a mirror to reveal her current self. The piece is mainly pink and blue, two bright colors contrasting each other.
