Blue Guitar by Caroline Ji

Caroline Ji​ Toronto, Canada

Caroline Ji is an oil painter from Toronto, Canada. Fascinated with painting people, her work centers around themes of solitude, self-perception, emotional intimacy, and how human beings relate to each other. Having been an engineer before painting, she constantly finds herself trying to reconcile the unemotional analyses of image making - spatial depth, geometry, design and composition, reality vs painted reality, and so forth - with the emotional urge to make paintings, so that the images may convey the intended emotions while being rooted in critical thinking. She paints people around her, and her memories and thoughts surrounding immigration, gender equality and its power dynamics, cultural identity, emotional capacity all contribute to the narrative in her work.

Caroline received her BASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2012. She has exhibited in Canada and USA, with her paintings in private collections across North America, Europe, and Asia. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and was commissioned to do the official presidential portrait for Victoria University (University of Toronto) in 2022. She has done an artist residency in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, Canada. She currently works and teaches out of her Toronto studio.