Throughout an undergraduate degree in her native China and a post-graduate degree at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Elena Zhao has developed both theoretical and practical skills to emerge as an oil painter whose work mediates between Eastern and Western influences. Her Eastern schooling in a historically Western medium has given rise to paintings that covertly eschew racial recognition. Blurred faces and indistinct figures are reflections of the way Elena acquired her painterly skills, a gentle abstraction of the inherently filtered effect of her academic studies. This duality drives her practice, lying at the heart of her work.
Guided largely by intuition, Elena’s practice harnesses equal parts meditation and conscious expression. Her technical methodologies are largely shaped by the unification of her formal academic qualifications and the concentrated study of contemporary painters such as Flora Yukhnovich and Eiji Miwa alongside such prominent classical painters as Francois Boucher and Jean-Honore Fragonard.
With its undeniable allusion to classical paintings Elena’s work pays homage to the past and the ways in which people choose to depict themselves and others through portraiture. It reminds the audience of how our collective sense of the world is deeply temporal, unfolding from a rich and linear history of previous events that gradually mould it into the form it is now with all the context of the present day.