Weiwei Lo
loweiwei@yahoo.com
+1 732-306-343

Artist Statement
Everyone was once a child whose imagination had no boundary. As the child grows up however, the world becomes more complicated but “smaller”; many people gradually lose their happiness and their clarity in ever-widening chaos. In my miniature watercolor portraits, I intend to capture the natural innocence and goodness of children. This is not because I am blind about sorrow and struggle; this is not because I am ignorant of the confusion and cruelty; but, this is because I believe the flow of positive energy can be passed through children’s smiles and fearlessness. For me, these paintings are like a mirror that has implicitly reflected my inner true self. Although it is almost impossible for us to always maintain a child’s viewpoint, I really hope these paintings would remind us about how simple and cheerful our lives could be.

BIO
Weiwei Lo is an American artist currently working toward her MFA in Painting and Drawing at New Jersey City University (NJCU), where her primary interests are in representational painting and calligraphy. Before entering the MFA program, Weiwei studied Chinese traditional painting, and has had extensive experiences in Chinese calligraphy, beginning in her youth. On several occasions, her Chinese calligraphy and paintings have been selected to join the annual group shows held by the Hsin-Ruey Chinese Art Association in New Jersey. Driven by curiosity and self-challenge, Weiwei started to explore Western art by taking classes from local community programs, as well as participating in undergraduate art courses at NJCU where she worked as an adjunct professor of mathematics. Weiwei loves to try various mediums to build her different realistic subjects. In recent years, she switched from working in oil to watercolor, focusing on the project, “Children of Lesotho,” which includes fifty small-sized portraits of children who were her students when she was a language teacher in an orphanage organization from 2019 to 2021.
Feeling a strong passion for vulnerable children, Weiwei is currently working on a related project, “Children of War,” where she is painting forty-two small-sized watercolor portraits of children who are experiencing, or have survived, war. In this project, her reference images are chosen and cropped from multiple sources, including newspaper, news video and magazines, speaking to themes of childhood innocence in peril.