Samantha Nianqi Forkin is a Chinese American artist currently residing in California where she received her B.A. in Studio Art from Fresno State University. Samantha paints cool, dreamlike atmospheres whose calmness contain expansive and immersive depths. Intimate views that focus on her subjects similarly to remembering dreams, a blurry in-between moment that’s elusiveness continues to weigh heavily with you even after it’s long gone. The balance between a dreamlike and digital quality through a loose painterly application creates an abstraction of subjects focusing on the intensity of memories and experiences, inviting you to to look longer and deeper.
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NEONQI comes from a play on my middle name Nianqi that I created. The latter’s meaning “to look at a beautiful piece of jade.” The word neon conjures the alluring glow of neon signs and their artificial beauty. Qi generally refers to the Chinese concept of the energy that can be found in everything, both living and nonliving. These concepts and the referentiality to myself and my identity has become a stamp in all of my work.