ONEQ / LAUREN YS / MAKOTO CHI / STELLAR LEUNA October 08 2021
Feature Shows
Outré Gallery Fitzroy
8 October – 31 October 2021
ONEQ is an Okinawa-based artist who creates modern pin-up illustrations influenced by her youth spent on a very secluded Japanese island where she would spend her days dreaming of aquatic adventures and reading countless comics at a neighbor's home. Completely self taught as an artist her work has taken the world by storm over the past two years as her aesthetic is altruistic in beauty and form, appealing to all those who pass by.
Lauren YS is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work is influenced by multiple stages of focus, both geographically and in practice. With dynamic bouts in academics, literature and writing, teaching, illustration, and animation leading up to their arrival in the urban art sphere, the influences of these phases of their own career add up to a robust style of murals and fine art. Lauren's work is influenced by dreams, mythology, death, comics, love, sex, psychedelia, animation and her Asian-American heritage.
Makoto Chi is a visual artist and tattooist, based in Vancouver, Canada. Their image-making practice engages with the use of figures to evoke emotive drama, taking interest in power relations and ontological distinctions between individuals and between the individual/environment. They graduated from Emily Carr University with a bachelor's degree in Illustration in 2015.
Born in Kowloon, Hong Kong and raised in Sydney, Australia, Stellar Leuna has always been fascinated by what it means to “belong”, so unsurprisingly, coming-of-age themes are frequently visited subject matter in her work. Teenage girls, witches and demons all seem to live happily and harmoniously in a surreal black-and-white dystopia where the sun never rises. It is through a subtle dark humour that Stellar is able to illustrate her feelings on heavy subject matter such as alienation, rejection, romance, death and the afterlife - without deeply upsetting the viewer. Starting out in self-publishing her own art zines and designing merch for bands and local streetwear labels, her bold cartoony renditions of “satanic panic” imagery inspired by the covers of her favourite punk and heavy metal records makes her work appealing not just to those in the underground art world - a fact that has become evident since her collaboration with major fashion labels PRADA and Tiffany & Co in 2018.