Artist Spotlight: Sophie Xu

My personal signifier is more of a color scheme. I always wear jewel tones, like Burgundy, emerald. I dress pretty casual. I always wear a plain t-shirt, it’s easy to layer. 

The last thing I bought and cherished…I don’t buy things too often. Except for video games, I spent a lot of money on that. I’ve been in “among us”, and bought “overcooked 2”, which is an older game, but I’ve been into it because my friends got into it. I like to play on PC version of among us, it’s a lot better with friends because you can talk. 

Since the quarantine I’ve retrieved some of my hobbies. I’ve always had a lot of random hobbies that I might have forgotten about. I really enjoyed that quarantine made me realize that I like writing. I only wrote for school during the last few years, like exploratory and nonfiction stuff. Quarantine really gives me the time to bring writing back. If I could write whatever I wanted, I’d still enjoy creative writing and fiction, but I could never finish. 

My aspirations for 2021 is to get through quarantine and try to connect with more people in this type of environment, building relationships and not fail. I am in a few research teams, and one that I invest a lot of time is bringing tech equity to the Bronx. I grew up around there and it was a big issue with connectivity, especially in the southern areas that did not have internet access. I have the opportunity to work on that now with some big organizations around New York city. I’m in DFA NYU that is collaborating with Dream Yard, a group mainly helps with art education, bringing tech access and food donations, also part of this Bronx community relief effort.

The music I’m enjoying… I listen to a lot of really random international pop, Chinese pop and French pop, Latin or Thai. I don’t know how I got into it, but now I constantly get recommendations from Spotify or Youtube. I really enjoy these cultures and languages. I learned French in high school, Spanish before that, and grew up in China for a bit. It’s also crazy because some of the stuff I listen to I thought are very niche, but are actually really popular in the region. Like they have hundreds of billions of views on Youtube. 

My favorite spot in an art museum is the waiting room or the reception area of the museums. I am pretty interested in architecture or interior design, like the MoMA there are some cubbies that move. I also really like the Frick museum. It is free with NYU. I also recently realized you can go through the whole thing on Google Maps. How is that legal?

My go-to medium is… I do a lot of digital illustrations, and now I work with charcoal and pen. I really like doing layering. This is common to the way I dress as well. I did studio art in high school, and during the last few years my teacher brought in new materials for us to work with and it opened up a new world, very hands on, like conte crayons, very pastey materials. For a long time, I never felt like I could draw what I was seeing myself, and I felt like I was behind other people, but having those additional mediums allowed me to do what I wanted to do. With digital art, I started pretty late since I didn’t have an Adobe illustrator, but it felt so natural. I just really get it, and it is very fast for me to pick it up. I’m wondering if other people felt the same way with other medium. 

Pining

My target piece with chalk pastel, I couldn’t really capture it with other mediums, so I thought this was really suitable. 

Dessert 

My first big digital art piece. I just took my first course and It was really satisfying to piece all these shapes together that you wouldn’t think would make any sense. It’s satisfying to see all these blobs of color together to make an image. I chose food that I liked.