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 reflect how 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.
Primarily guided by intuition, Elena's process harnesses equal parts meditation and conscious expression. Her technical methodologies are shaped by the unification of her formal academic qualifications and the concentrated study of contemporary painters such as Flora Yukhnovich, Dario Vargas, and Iain Andrews, alongside such prominent classical painters as Francois Boucher and Jean-Honore Fragonard.
Elena's undeniable allusion to classical paintings pays homage to the past and how people depict themselves and others through portraiture. It reminds the audience of how our collective sense of the world is profoundly temporal, unfolding from a rich history of previous events that gradually mould it into the form it is now with all the context of the present day.