Day of the Dead and Other Works

Sylvia Ji’s haunting, seductive and psychedelically tinged portrayals of women offer a whole new slant on femininity, and blur the line between high- and lowbrow art. Ji says that her subjects are symbolic reflections of herself and people she knows, or just nameless faces set in a landscape of fleeting and decaying beauty. The dominant influence in her work is La Calavera Catrina, the iconic skeleton dame of Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, and her macabre, grotesque, yet glamorous take on the Sugar Skull tradition intermingles with gorgeously colorful images of elegant empresses, Native American tribeswomen, and Baroque beauties. This retrospective monograph offers a lavish overview of an artist who draws inspiration from life and death to create highly charged and darkly exotic work.

Sylvia Ji was born in 1982, and raised in San Francisco, California. Ji graduated with distinction in 2005 from the Academy of Art University of San Francisco with a Bachelors degree in traditional illustration, and had her first ambitious and successful solo show while still in her last year of school. Ji’s work has been featured in numerous gallery exhibitions worldwide, as well as Art Basel’s “Art Fair Now” in Switzerland and “Art From The New World” at Bristol’s City Museum & Art Gallery in the UK. She has been profiled in publications such as Juxtapoz, Trace, and Mesh Magazine, and her painting “Dona Dolorosa” graced the cover of LA Weekly. She lives in Los Angeles.