Tejasri
IN MY STUDIO
PAINTING
DRAWING
ANIMATION
CODE
About the Artist
Born and raised in New York, Tejasri Vijayakumar is a young aspiring artist and currently a student at Columbia University studying Computer Science and Visual Art.
RATROCK FEATURED ARTIST INTERVIEW
March 17, 2022
I have this core memory from third grade: in my art class, we were learning Chinese ink brush paintings. I had a white teacher, so it didn’t really make any sense. We were looking at these ink brush paintings and then trying to copy them, and she would walk around and be like, “Oh, your brushwork feels too Western.” I mean, why wouldn’t they be? We were third graders and no one was Chinese. Who was going to have the visual context? Something about her comment just made me think about this question––what does it mean for a brushstroke to be “Eastern”?
Oftentimes, when you see something visually, you can identify it with a place. That’s something I've always searched for with my art, because my identity’s been so convoluted and mixed up with everything else. It's hard for me to distinguish what is visually South Asian or South Indian, and what came from elsewhere.
