Featured Artist: Mimi Leung

The art of Shepparton-based visual artist Mimi Leung is delightfully zany and bursting with brightness, characterised by joyfully chaotic characters in a constant state of explosive motion.  

Mimi uses her artwork not only as a way to escape the mundanity of everyday life, but to address challenging subjects like identity, intergenerational trauma, and parent-child relationships in multi-cultural families.  As such, Mimi makes her work purposefully attention-grabbing, infusing it with intense kinetic energy and vivid colour schemes to help spread awareness about the topics she cares about.

Born in Hong Kong and growing up in the U.K, Mimi studied graphic design at Central St Martins then went on to complete an MA in Communication and Design at the Royal College of Art in 2007.  A multi-talented and prolific artist, Mimi's portfolio boasts high-profile commercial clients like Disney Australia and Samsung, but many may recognise her artwork from 7-11s around Australia in her colourful campaign for Slurpee.

This month we were proud to sponsor the fine art printing for Mimi's new exhibition, Growing Up With You, now showing at the Benalla Art Gallery until August 18th.  Growing Up With You reflects on Mimi's relationship with her art practise before and after motherhood, broadly showing the shift in focus and the artist’s ‘growing up’ – as an artist, a mother, and as a human – tracing her journey from trauma to healing through both her commercial and non-commercial work.

We highly recommend checking out this excellent exhibition - make a day out of it and bring the kids!

What were some key memories you had growing up that turned you onto a creative path?
I have just always loved drawing and painting. I was drawn to copying pictures as a child – from cartoons to still lifes to motorbikes. When I found out that some people were able to make a living out of it, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I had family members who were really talented at drawing but never saw art as a valid profession and I really fought against that. I just wanted to be able to do something I loved for a living because doing something I didn’t care about everyday sounded horrid.

Characterised by bold, funky colour schemes and a cohort of zany and chaotic characters, your work is both electrifying and frantically joyful. What draws you to work in this specific style?
We’re all immediately drawn to bright colours and smiley faces and I thought that if I wanted to talk about big things then it should appeal to a lot of people. I like combining the immediacy of bright colours and fun characters with more meaningful messages because it doesn’t matter how important your message is if no one stops to notice it.

We’d love to chat about your upcoming exhibition, Growing Up With You. What are the key themes you explore in this collection of artworks, and what led to it’s conception?
Well, it’s all about how motherhood has changed me in retrospect. My main relationship before kids was with my art and the things that I made, as selfish as it sounds, and then when I became a mother it just completely changed my view on life and who I was. It was a difficult process (and it continues to be) but as I struggled with losing myself to motherhood, I began to accept it and welcome the change despite what I thought I would be doing or wanted to do with my life/art. It’s strange and not the approach I thought I would take before becoming a mother but I’m enjoying allowing my kids to influence my art. This exhibition is a way of looking back and kind of reassuring myself that there is a productive, creative and valuable way forward as an artist who is also a mother and the unknowns that both those roles bring. I have grown up with art and let it take me in different directions and now I see the parallel between that relationship and the relationships I have with my kids.

What are some important insights you’ve gained about yourself and your art practise over the course of completing this exhibition?
Most of the work in this show is from my existing portfolio but curating it in this way has helped me put my journey into perspective. I have come some way from being a stereotypical troubled, angry young artist to becoming something like a “full human being” who can accept the unknown and take responsibility for my own actions, to an extent.

This show reflects back to me where I’ve come from and the challenges I have overcome in my personal life as I have grown. When you’re in the thick of it, you can’t really see the growth you have undertaken and the influence it’s had on you. Seeing what I have done over the years, it’s easier to track the changes I have made both artistically and personally. My art is a record of that.

Childhood and motherhood are key themes explored in Growing Up With You. How has becoming a parent altered your artistic identity and creative process?
I really struggled to remain the same after becoming a mother until I accepted that I am fundamentally not the same as ‘before’. Pregnancy and motherhood was a huge physical, mental and emotional adaptation for me and it was really important to eventually realise that I had to allow my art, or artistic identity, to change and grow too – just like my kids.

How do you portray and discuss the unique challenges and strengths of multicultural families in Growing Up With You?
I’m not sure I really do explicitly in this show… other than that the angry and quite graphic images I made when I was younger was, I now realise, a result of my growing up as an immigrant. I just always felt so rejected and wrong, but I also knew that I was alive and here and I wanted to take up space like how I saw others take up space, though I often felt it wasn’t deserved. From a childhood growing up in England, my difference was often emphasized and commented on and it fed into my sense of inferiority that I then internalised. I felt that I was somehow unlovable because of this experience. And as the child of immigrant parents, I was dissuaded from art and pushed towards more academic futures – the stereotypical accountancy, architecture, legal and medical routes. It kind of made me more resolute in trying to make this art thing work. It made me more determined and I worked harder and studied harder because I knew I had to overcome the prejudices I would face as a ‘foreigner’. I hope things are different now and will continue to become easier for my own kids.

Finding one’s authentic creative identity can be a difficult process for artists. Do you have any advice to impart to those who are struggling to find their artistic identity?
I’m not too sure how our artistic identity differs from our regular personality. When I make art I feel like I am expressing a true part of myself that I can’t express in other ways – be it in conversations, as an illustrator, a mother or the other roles I play in life. Whilst there is a true, authentic part of me in each of those roles I play, when I am truly free in the art that I make it Is easy and joyful even if the underlying sentiment is ‘bad’ or ‘sad’. There is pleasure in expressing yourself just as you are in a way that is unique to you. Perhaps that is the way to unravelling our artistic identities.

What’s next for your creative practice? Do you have any exciting projects or exhibitions lined up in the near future?
Yeh… I have a few projects in the works. Some creative projects for myself as an artist, and some as more of a facilitator. I recently started an arts collective in Shepparton and we hope to empower local artists to initiate, participate and engage in arts activities here in the future. I guess it all comes back down to my kids… I want to try to make where they grow up a place full of culture, creative opportunity and happy people. I want to try contribute to making this place somewhere they feel they can belong (and for myself as well). The best way I am able to do that is with my experience in art and my belief in the mental, social and economic benefits of practicing art, whatever form it may take.

Thanks for chatting with us today Mimi!