Roxanne J.Y. Teng

Roxanne J.Y. Teng describes her practice as “soul art,” an approach to painting centered on memory, emotion, and the inner lives of her subjects. Rather than reconstructing a person or event literally, she attempts to represent experiences that may have unfolded across years and acquired new meanings over time.

Her works address joy and sorrow, attachment and separation, life and death, and the contradictions contained within individual memory. These subjects lead her across different styles and mediums, since no single visual form can accommodate the full range of experiences she wants to portray.

Teng grew up in a business-oriented family that did not place particular emphasis on literature or fine art. Her mother, however, enjoyed knitting and other handicrafts, while Teng gravitated toward art books and imaginative observation. As a child, she did not regard the natural world as visually fixed. A tree could assume strange forms, and birds seemed to possess a language she might understand.

This early inclination toward fantasy became more structured when she began studying painting at five years old. Her mentor remained part of her life for nearly eighteen years, providing patient instruction and a stable creative environment.

“He guided me like a father,” Teng recalls, “teaching me how to understand art, how to learn and practice it.”

The studio became inseparable from her identity. Long before art became a professional question, it had already established the structure through which she interpreted experience. Teng later studied art and design at an art college, though her family remained concerned that fine art alone would not provide financial independence and encouraged her to consider business.

That tension between artistic commitment and practical expectation clarified the depth of her attachment to art. Teng describes love for a practice as something that can develop gradually, without calculation. Once established, it becomes difficult to separate from the rest of one’s life.

Her admiration for Vincent van Gogh is rooted less in stylistic influence than in his dedication. She values the intensity of his engagement with art, his perseverance, and the directness she perceives in his work. For Teng, this level of commitment has become increasingly rare in contemporary culture.

Her own practice does not follow a strict routine. Inspiration often arrives during an otherwise ordinary day, without ceremony or preparation. She picks up a pen or begins working, allowing the emerging form to determine what feels most appropriate.

“When my inspiration arrives, it needs no ritual and no explanation,” she says. “It simply comes naturally.”

Although Teng works intuitively, her concept of soul art has developed through years of sustained attention. The process begins with the recognition that emotional experience cannot always be represented through a single realistic scene. Memories accumulate, change, and become entangled with later understanding. A photograph can preserve a moment’s appearance, but it cannot fully describe how that moment continues to operate within a person.

Teng therefore treats painting as a form of interpretation rather than replication. Her works combine stories, emotions, remembered details, and symbolic forms to represent what literal documentation leaves unresolved.

She is particularly interested in collaboration with clients. Instead of approaching a commission as the delivery of a predetermined object, she regards the initial exchange as the beginning of the artwork. Clients share memories, emotional histories, and significant experiences, which Teng then translates into visual form.

“The moment that collaboration begins is, to me, the moment a work of art is born,” she explains.

This exchange requires empathy. Teng listens for the emotional structure beneath a story rather than selecting only its most visually obvious details. The finished painting may not resemble a conventional record of the event, but it can preserve how that event was experienced and remembered.

She considers this connection one of the most fulfilling aspects of her practice. Success is not absolute or easily quantified. What matters most is whether the completed work feels emotionally accurate to the person whose experience helped generate it.

An encounter with a stranger clarified this possibility. While dining in a crowded restaurant, Teng shared a table with a woman she had never met. They began discussing their work, and when the woman learned that Teng was an artist, she asked to see images of her paintings.

The woman initially responded casually as she scrolled through the photographs on Teng’s phone. When she reached a work titled Persona, however, she became quiet. Her attention remained fixed on the image, and she began to cry.

After regaining her composure, the woman explained that the painting had recalled a difficult period in her life. The connection was not tied to a single dramatic event or an easily summarized story. It involved years of complexity, turbulence, and emotions that could not be described precisely in words.

For Teng, the encounter demonstrated how an artwork can reach beyond the circumstances of its production. Persona had not been created from the stranger’s history, yet the image gave her access to an experience she recognized as her own.

The episode also reinforced Teng’s skepticism toward purely literal representation. Experiences extending across long periods cannot be condensed into one or two reenacted scenes without losing their complexity. Even when people attempt to reproduce their former selves, the reconstruction is altered by age, memory, and present knowledge.

Teng believes this limitation also applies to emerging technologies. Photography, video, and artificial intelligence can generate or preserve appearances, but she questions whether they can reproduce the shifting emotional significance of a lived experience. Her position does not reject these tools outright. It identifies what she sees as a remaining role for the artist: interpreting what cannot be documented directly.

Her use of the term “soul art” names that interpretive process. It refers to work that gathers emotion and thought into a form capable of commemorating experience without pretending to recreate it exactly.

Teng’s quiet working hours often arrive at night. Sitting at her desk after the day has settled, she reads, listens to music, and allows ideas to emerge. Books and music also provide restoration outside active studio work, offering different emotional and narrative structures from which she can draw.

Her practice remains open to collaboration across disciplines. Teng believes soul art can develop through exchanges with artists, musicians, and people without formal creative training. A professional artistic background is less important than the presence of a story, memory, or emotion capable of initiating the work.

This position places listening at the center of authorship. The artist does not abandon her individual vision, but uses it to receive and translate another person’s experience. Teng argues that artists must be willing to approach ordinary lives with humility rather than treating personal expression as the only source of meaningful work.

She also hopes contemporary art can return more fully to the relationship between emotion and thought. For Teng, art should alter perception, preserve what matters within lived experience, and encourage viewers to notice the diversity and strangeness of ordinary life.

Her current projects extend these concerns into landscape. Teng is experimenting with mixed media and new visual approaches to portray Oregon’s natural environments alongside the memories and emotions associated with them. The works are not intended as straightforward scenic records. Landscape becomes a container for personal history, shaped by what occurred there and how it continues to be remembered.

She is also collaborating with musicians, opening her practice to the relationship between visual form, sound, and emotional recollection. These projects allow her concept of soul art to move beyond portraiture while retaining its focus on subjective experience.

Teng’s advice to emerging artists is concise: remain committed to what they believe and continue doing the work they genuinely want to pursue. Her own career reflects that persistence, beginning with a childhood studio practice and developing into an approach concerned with what conventional records cannot hold.

In Teng’s paintings, memory is not a fixed image of the past. It is an active structure, repeatedly altered by time. Her work begins where documentation becomes insufficient, using art to interpret the emotional residue that remains.