Christine Wang draws praise with her art

February 4, 2019

By Christina Li and Daisy Liu

Some of us might doodle in class, but Christine Wang has taken it up a notch.

A junior at Lexington High School, Wang has been seriously pursuing art since freshman year. She mainly works with digital illustration tools and two-dimensional mediums such as oil paint, watercolor, colored pencil and charcoal.

Wang already boasts some serious accolades: She won the 2017 Congressional Art Competition; her award-winning self-portrait hung in the U.S. Capitol for a year. This year, she received an Honorable Mention in the prestigious 2019 National YoungArts Foundation competition.

Wang hopes to express her own experiences through art, which she sees as an unparalleled medium for conveying perspective.

“You don’t need to learn how to understand art like you do with language. I can utilize certain visual patterns and symbols to communicate ideas and connect with others in ways that I think resonate much deeper within people than language can,” Wang said.

For Wang, art and life augment each other.

“I often draw or paint realistically and will use references such as photographs or direct observations from real life. I’ve learned to look for certain details and patterns within these references... [and] I’ve started to subconsciously notice these patterns in my day-to-day life,” Wang said.

However, Wang thrives on the unfamiliar, rather than the quotidian.

“I’m often most creative when I have some prompt or scene to base my thinking [on]. This helps me explore more new and unfamiliar ideas instead of defaulting to things I’m used to creating art about. I love going to art museums whenever I travel and seeing the way other artists think through the artistic choices they make,” Wang said.

Despite her success, Wang faces artistic and creative challenges.

“I used to suffer from really bad artist’s block. It would become really frustrating at times and make me question whether I actually enjoyed making art,” Wang said.

Wang reflected on her evolution as an artist.

“Now, I’m a lot more open-minded and I take a lot more risks in my art. I’ve learned that I should figure out what art means to me personally rather than let someone else define it for me,” Wang said.

She can say with confidence that art, in some form, will be a part of her future.

“I feel like I’ve been doing art for so long that it’s become too entangled with my life to imagine a future without it. Even if I end up on a different [career] path, I know I’ll always be creating it and appreciating it,” Wang said.