We recently connected with Ruoxi Hua and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Ruoxi, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
I have always been interested in art, and when I told my parents that I wanted to go to an art school for college, they both gave me a hard “No.” So I ended up in college majoring in biology. But apart from biology, I was free to choose any other classes I am interested, and so I go to as many art classes as possible, as well as some philosophy classes. During my sophomore year, I was in a figure drawing class. The teacher saw my works in class and encouraged me to become an art major. By the end of that semester, I declared a biology and art double-major. However, at the same time, I had to take a semester off due to depression. It was during that several months of recovery when I came to realize that I had more control over my life than I thought, and I ought to decide what I want to do for the rest of my life. After my break, I started taking oil-painting classes. I had never done oil painting before at that point of my life but I aspired to be good at it. My oil painting professor, who has influenced me the most, would talk on and on about painting and throw all these art books at me, because he knew I am interested. I tried to absorb as much as possible from what he said. I would study the painting he told me to look at and I would put extra time working on my painting as soon as I have spare time. Then unfortunately the pandemic happened and our in-person painting classes were forced to come to a halt. My professor asked us to do drawings of the interior of our living spaces, and then he recommended me two summer art programs which fortunately enough were still able to take place during COVID, So I never stopped studying art. It was that summer that I came to realize that I could not get tired of making art. Whenever I have free time, I would go to my studio or see other great paintings rather than read more about biology. Therefore I told my parents about my plan to go to a MFA program after college. Naturally, they were not very happy at the beginning, and we actually spent months arguing over this matter. In the end, they came to acknowledge my insistence and agreed to my plan.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am an emerging artist who works with painting, printmaking, and drawing. My works are mostly representational, figuring multiple figures in some narratives. During college, the narratives in my works are predominantly surreal and allegorical, often alluding to Western mythology and literature. For example, during the summer after my junior year, I worked on a narrative painting series that takes place on an alien planet. In my senior year I created another drawing series that is themed after the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse in Christian mythology. In this body of work, I am mainly exploring and discussing various forms of violence between individuals or groups of individuals. Since I came to New York for graduate school, my works have gravitated from surrealism towards realism. I am currently working on a multi-paneled narrative painting. I handcrafted these panels into these unconventional shapes, as a compositional play. Instead of having everything in the pictorial space react to the rectangular edge, I allow the edges to also be an organic part of the composition. The idea is to allow my painting to extend itself into the surrounding space. The work depicts four scenes in public/private bathrooms. Through, the narrative, which is more open-ended than in my previous works, I want to portray the feeling of alienation and isolation in the most private moments, which I felt when going to college alone in a foreign country. The subject matter of the bathroom is inspired by several previous bathroom paintings I did in college (and from live!)
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The first and most important quality to me is persistence. The most important thing for a painter is, naturally, to keep painting, and I think it really applies to any form of art. I often hear other painters say that only one out of a hundred paintings you do is good. So a painter needs to be persistent enough to go through that 99 bad paintings until he reaches the good one. To me perseverance means that I need to be in my studio and put in some work everyday no matter how I feel that day. For some of the days, I might feel happy, calm, and peaceful, and whatever I put down on the canvas just works itself out magically; for other days, which are most days, I might be so frustrated, anxious, or distracted that I want to toss my work out of the window the moment I see it. To me, being persistent means acknowledging that most of the times I will not be at my best but it is still very important to keep working and push my works forward. Like my painting teacher from college used to say, “If you are not frustrated, you are not doing it right.”
The second quality or skill is tolerance for uncertainty and failure, which I am still working on. A genuinely creative process always comes with a great amount of uncertainty; for me personally, uncertainty can be very terrifying, and I believe I am not the only one. I worked with very controlled methods because they provided me with a sense of certainty and therefore security. However, over time I noticed that my tight grip has almost suffocated my works, which have become chores of filling in details more than search and discovery. The closer I bring my work towards completion, the more “precious” it gets, and the more neurotic I get. But It is when happy accidents happens or when I make drastic changes to my works that I feel the work is alive again. So with my current work, I am trying to be more comfortable with openness and more welcome to moments of accidents. Creative destruction is very important.
The third important skill, or habit, is to constantly be in a dialogue with great paintings throughout history (and by history, I also mean the contemporary era). No matter where I set up my studio, I always have a collection of art books with me. I will do studies of works I like in my sketchbook and note down for myself which parts of the work are successful. I will do the same if I go to an art show that I am deeply interested in. To merely “look at” these works are not enough, I have to truly “see” them by sketching down my understanding of them (rather than just copying them down). When I am not drawing or painting, I would be on social media, where I follow a number of artists and art accounts. If I see an image I like, I would zoom in and ask myself what is working, and whether I can apply it to my work; if I run into a work that I don’t like, I would also think about what are the qualities that are not successful. By exposing myself to greater works, I am not only learning how to discern good works from bad ones, but also allowing the good works to “soak into” my mind and give me a better sensibility.
How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?
I am currently working on an extensive piece, which takes up a lot of my time and energy, and my struggle lies in the conflict between producing an extensive work and producing a body of works. Currently I am trying to work on several smaller, simpler paintings while working on the larger piece. Another challenge is that I have to keep a consistent handling throughout the entire painting process even when I am changing as an artist, which could be encouraging and frustrating at the same time.
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