Artist statement

I paint buildings in the middle of change. I grew up in Yarmag, a district of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where crumbling Soviet-era buildings and houses that families could not afford to maintain stood beside gleaming new apartment towers. When my grandfather’s house was demolished to make way for an office building, the developers promised to preserve his trees, then tore them all down. That loss still stays with me.

My thesis series, Faded Memory, depicts abandoned buildings as nature reclaims them. These buildings are not empty shells. They hold the memories of the people who lived in them, the joy, sadness, anger, and love experienced within their walls, and those memories persist as grass covers the roof and trees grow from the chimney. I work in oil with an impressionistic approach because light itself carries emotion: the way afternoon sun falls across a broken window can turn a scene of decay into something that holds beauty, melancholy, or quiet hope.

Since moving to Chicago, I’ve often been stopped on my walks by an unexpected scene or a passing change in the light. Small Moments, an ongoing series of 6 × 6 inch paintings, began as a way to hold on to those fleeting encounters as I get to know my new home. Through their intimate scale and hazy atmosphere, I want the paintings to draw viewers into a moment that feels both immediate and remembered.