About me
Fine Artist
Candy Qu is an Asian artist born in China, based in Los Angeles, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her work explores the intersection of identity, culture, and personal transformation, drawing from both her Chinese heritage and my experiences as an immigrant in America. Candy creates fictional and autobiographical scenes that reflect her journey of adaptation and self-discovery. She defines culture as a medium of existence, pervasive and often invisible. Migration and cross-cultural experience function as shifts in this medium, like fish in the water, forcing awareness to recalibrate how it moves, breathes, and persists. In moments of instability, the self enters a suspended state, unanchored, but intensely alert. Within this flow, identity is not fixed but continuously formed. In-betweenness is not a deficiency or temporary state, but a sustained mode of existence. Consciousness emerges at the intersection of overlapping cultural currents, shaped through ongoing movement, adaptation, and reorientation rather than stable belonging.
Candy has held four solo exhibitions at Space One and a Half Gallery, L Gallery, Tinglan Art Museum, and Fort Da Gallery across China. Her artwork has been exhibited in New York A Space gallery, Temple Gallery, Trolley Barn Gallery, BWAC gallery, Drawing Room, Seattle Art Gallery B612, South Gate Civic Center Museum, Muzeo Museum and Cultural Center, Brookline Art Center, Indy Art Center, Risd Design Center, Risd Memorial Hall painting department gallery, Risd Waterman gallery, Chaffey Community Museum of Art, California Institute of Art's main gallery, Garcia Center for the Arts, the Washington DC district office, Visual Arts Journal and Art-Collide Online Gallery. In the past, she received Eutopia Art Residency in Greece, A Space Gallery Artist Residency in New York, Annual Risd art sale, Fall and Spring 2024 honors designation at Risd, Rancho Cucamonga community art scholarship, exhibition proposal finalist of Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis, California Young Artist scholar, silver key in Scholastic painting and art portfolio, and second place in congressional art competition.