Day of the Dead and Other Works

American artist Sylvia Ji’s haunting, seductive and psychedelically tinged portraits of women blur the line between high- and lowbrow art. The dominant influence in her work is La Calavera Catrina, the iconic skeleton dame of Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations. Day of the Dead and Other Works offers a lavish overview of an artist who draws inspiration from life and death to create darkly exotic paintings.

Foreword by Jan Corey Helford

Jan Corey Helford is the curator and co-owner of Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles. She began as a collector of the Pop Surreal and Lowbrow scene and is responsible for a number of milestone events in the growth of the New Contemporary movement, most notably the Art From The New World American artist group exhibition at England’s Bristol City Museum (May 2010), following the infamous Banksy exhibition Banksy versus Bristol Museum in 2009.

About the artist

Sylvia Ji was born in 1982, and raised by artistic parents in San Francisco, California. Her interest in art was implanted at a very young age, when she would look through her mother’s sketchbooks and watch her father paint. Ji graduated with distinction in 2005 from the Academy of Art University of San Francisco with a Bachelor’s degree in traditional illustration, and had her first ambitious and successful solo show while still in her last year of school. After graduating, she relocated to Los Angeles in 2005, where she currently resides.

Ji’s work has been featured in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions and art fairs worldwide. She has been profiled in many publications, too, including Juxtapoz, Trace and Mesh Magazine, and her painting Dona Dolorosa graced the cover of the LA Weekly for a feature story about Juxtapoz magazine’s Laguna Museum retrospective, “In The Land of Retinal Delights”.