| I love mixing it up. I don’t care where my bits of imagery, paint strokes or techniques come from—once I set them on the canvas, they’re mine and I own them. I have an “everything goes” attitude when it comes to painting. I want it to be inclusive and democratic. Everything can have its say and its place. I can’t help but be a product of a globalized culture. As a child, I lived in Hong Kong, Indonesia, and England with a British father and an Australian mother. Sometimes I don’t know which team to cheer on at the Olympics, but it’s a good thing really. | 
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Fiona Rae
Fiona Rae, Warm Dream and Beautiful Yearning, 2008. Oil, acrylic and gouache on canvas, 60 x 50 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.I love mixing it up. I don’t care where my bits of imagery, paint strokes or techniques come from—once I set them on the canvas, they’re mine and I own them. I have an “everything goes” attitude when it comes to painting. I want it to be inclusive and democratic. Everything can have its say and its place. I can’t help but be a product of a globalized culture. As a child, I lived in Hong Kong, Indonesia, and England with a British father and an Australian mother.
Sometimes I don’t know which team to cheer on at the Olympics, but it’s a good thing really. I can take a Western sentimental version of a panda bear, a cartoon version of Chinese calligraphy, a window cleaner’s wipe-washing gesture, throw in an Abstract Expressionist way of moving oil paint around, structure the whole thing around a self-conscious and ironic multi-colored large-scale brushstroke, give the painting a Japanese interpretation of an English sentence as a title, and look! The end result is a strange picture of unexpected collisions and conversations, which I hope will provide a glimpse of a vivid and unsettling future world.
