My name is Yuqing Zhu. I am an American artist of Chinese and Mongolian heritage, named after a mythological flood-tamer of the Yangtze river. I am also a neuroscientist. I study the computations involved in perception of the visual world. Perception is an active process – in every moment, what we see is an imposition of what we wish to see. It is also heavily shaped by past experiences. I create self portrait collages as a means of constructing a personal mythology based upon my past, my present vision, and my hopes for the future. In the absence of forthright dialogue with one’s heritage, as has been the case in my life, personal history takes on a myth-building quality. Real events, ornamentation, convenient falsehoods, and Chinese and Mongolian fables are cut-and-pasted together into sometimes surreal, sometimes hyperreal scenes in my artwork. They compose the truest story I can tell.

yqzhu.com, @papriqa_