Brenda Louie


Brenda Louie is a California-based Chinese American artist known for her large, painterly abstractions and multimedia installations that explore a variety of subject matter, including migration, cultural hybridity, and Eastern philosophy. Louie has also been a longtime professor of studio art at California State University Sacramento, and has taught painting and drawing at California State University, Stanislaus, American River College, Sacramento, University of California, Davis, San Francisco Art Institute, and Stanford University.

Early life

Louie was born in a remote village in Guangdong province, China. She escaped the Great Chinese Famine when she was eight years old, traveling with her grandmother by foot to the southern coast, where they took a boat to Hong Kong in order to be reunited with her father, who had escaped the Maoist regime several years earlier. She later traveled to the United States in the 1970s to attend college, and settled in Northern California.
Louie's artistic talents were nurtured when she was a child by her father, Chiu Sheung Lui, who was an artist, calligrapher, and musician. Chinese calligraphy in particular was essential to her later artistic development.

Education

Louie initially graduated with a degree in Economics from California State University Sacramento but returned to the university several years later to study art, receiving a master's degree in Painting and Drawing in 1991. She went on to receive a MFA from Stanford University, where she trained with leading Bay Area artist Nathan Oliveira. In addition to studio art, Louie studied Taoism at California State University, Sacramento and Chinese philosophy, specifically the writings of Mencius, with scholar Philip J. Ivanhoe while at Stanford University.

Painting style

Much of Louie's work is autobiographical. Her own experiences of migration and a continuous cross-pollination of aesthetics and cultures are often expressed as layered forms, calligraphic gestures, mathematical or cartographic symbols, and/or collaged imagery. Universal issues such as life cycles, and death and mourning also figure into her work. Frequently working in series or large-scale installations, Louie seeks to create immersive experiences for the viewer.
Artist and scholar Chris Daubert notes that "Louie's paintings and installations embody and encompass these many strands of her cultural, familial, and personal histories. In several early works, the relationship between the personal calligraphic style of Huaisu and American abstract expressionist muscularity becomes apparent." In a 1993 exhibition review appearing in the visual arts magazine Art View, critic Randal Davis describes the "sheer visceral impact" of Louie's formal elements and "map making" of the "affective dimension" of her "intercultural experiences."

Notable exhibitions