From her Oakland studio, Yameng Lee Thorp is enveloping, rebuilding, and creating countless possibilities within colorful abstract paintings on canvas. What lights her up most are the unknowns that arise amid the creative process.
“I’m drawn to that dance on the edge of familiarity but pushes beyond so you’re never really sure what it is. I love when something goes against logic but is still making sense,” Lee Thorp told 48hills.
Since her initial foray into abstract works rendered in watercolor on paper combined with dry-medium drawings, Lee Thorp has expanded her approach by working on large scales, with both oils and acrylics on raw canvas and other fabrics stapled to the wall.
“The larger size takes the preciousness out of the equation, and the more that happens, the more it enables me to fully let go,” she said.
She says that she consciously abandons rules and uses any means necessary when it comes to materials. It’s important to her that her brain, hand, and tools are direct conduits to mark making in associative immediacy.
“I also like to be able to draw on canvas directly and carve out areas with charcoal and tiny brushes to create details. For example, Veiled Botany is a mix of these techniques while I was simultaneously contemplating Monet’s later works,” she said.
Lee Thorp sees Monet as having been ahead of his time, says that his landscapes feel “completely alive” to her. Her intention is to emulate his work, abandoning all rules that become a hindrance to that end.
“Those works were so loose and radically expressive that they almost looked like Abstract Expressionist paintings! Actually, it turned out that school of painters looked to this period of Monet’s work as a precursor to the movement,” Lee Thorp said.
Lee Thorp completed her BFA (2004) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, South Africa. Additionally, through a scholarship, she received an MA in design (2011) from Domus Academy in Milan, Italy, before arriving on the Bay Area art scene.
Hers is a transnational background. Born in China in the 1980s, she grew up in post-apartheid South Africa from age 11. Now living in the Oakland Hills near Joaquin Miller Park, she moved to the Bay Area shortly after finishing her master’s degree to pursue a career in design. Lee Thorp says she feels quite blessed to have discovered her place here.
“I find the Bay Area art community to be very open, welcoming, supportive and just generous. I have found and continue to grow a supportive network of artist friends,” she said.
Though she follows her own muse, Lee Thorp says the inspiration she receives from other painters is vast. Beyond Monet, she is also drawn to the works of Pierre Bonnard for his painterly brushwork and brave use of color. She also cites the paintings and drawings of Louise Bourgeois as an influence, and Peter Doig and Mimi Lauter as contemporary painters she admires for their rich layering techniques.
Lee Thorp is a mother with a full-time job, so her studio time is divided into evenings, weekends, and any chunk of time that she can squeeze out of a day, with the help of her partner. She refers to this circumstance as “burning the candle on three ends.” At her current studio in the Temescal neighborhood of North Oakland, Lee Thorp throws open her street facing window to let the sunlight in. It’s a long space with walls on either side and tables in the middle, with favorite books laid open next to vials of mixed paint and other materials for her craft.
“Sometimes a painting can get done pretty quickly in a few days, other times it can take months,” she said. “When that happens, I kind of know the painting is a front, it’s trying to tell me something and I have to be patient. I think my most successful works are ones that involve a struggle and a tussle. And when it doesn’t ask me for anything more and I am happy with it, I know it’s done.”
How did Lee Thorp find herself exhibiting abstract paintings in Bay Area art galleries, exactly? The story goes like this: During art school, she was intrigued by animation and soon after graduating, landed a handful of jobs attempting to penetrate that world.
“I wanted to work for Pixar, but instead I ended up working on TV commercials for American brands like Budweiser. You can see how quickly one can become disillusioned. So, I switched to studying design, then made my way to San Francisco,” she said.
Throughout this time, Lee Thorp always maintained an art practice. After long hours toiling away at digital design on the computer, her body craved “something analogue.”
After a brief interval away from painting, Lee Thorp resumed her practice in 2018 with exigency and a revitalized sense of identity. Becoming more experimental, she slowly evolved her style into what we now witness: large, bold abstract works on paper and fabric. This is when she began showing her work in both solo and group exhibitions. A major epiphany came just two years later in 2020, when Lee Thorp gave birth to a child one month into the pandemic lockdown.
“A few months after that I had a really profound shift happen. I remembered this distinct question—a ‘where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going?’ moment—like the painting by Gauguin of the same name, painted at a turning point in his life. I felt compelled to reexamine my life, from job to motherhood to my purpose. It went on and on and it was a lot,” Lee Thorp said.
She considered that it might be hormonal changes or new motherhood that deepened this personal inquiry, but whatever it was, Lee Thorp began remembering things from early childhood through her teenage years, images that she recalls coming at her daily like a tidal wave.
One of the memories that stayed with Lee Thorp was the story of her grandfather. Though she had never met him, she knew that he died during the Cultural Revolution. She also knew that he was an artist and an intellectual and that he was shamed and punished for it, like so many during that time. On her website, Lee Thorp succinctly sums up her dedication to art as “an act of defiance and an attempt to reclaim a heritage that had been taken.”
“After my grandfather died, my grandma—a mother of three—was forced to change our family name to her maiden name so they could re-integrate back into society. As much as it was a way to move on from a deep tragedy, it was also how you get ‘erased.’ You stay down because you need to move on, have kids to feed and bills to pay, you swallow the bitter pill because it’s a gift just to be alive,” Lee Thorp said.
She talks about how this great injustice, like an ignited ember, caught a flame inside her. From that moment, her paintings turned a corner and she hasn’t looked back. As part of this metamorphosis, Lee Thorp had her first solo exhibition, Invitation to Elsewhere, at The Compound Gallery in Oakland in 2022. She completed an artist-in-residence program with KALA Art Institute in Berkeley in 2024. And she is engaged in a multi-year project that touches on themes of myths and legends, history and the personal, and familial relationships.
“It’s a broad topic, but I’m really trying to understand how historical events reverberate through generations at a micro level. There is a main storyline, then there are events that happen in synchronicity to that thread. Like breadcrumbs, they all lead back to the day that changed everything 60+ years ago. I’m basically doing detective work on my family, part auto-biographical, part abstract mythical world re-building,” she said.
Depending on the particular theme she is working with on the project, she toggles between figuration and abstraction, and says she is fine with mixing things up, very comfortable with ambiguity.
Lee Thorp participated in the Fog Art and Design Fair in January 2025 and a group show at Pt.2 Gallery in Oakland, her primary representative, in March. She is busy preparing for her second solo show with Pt. 2, which runs from June 7-July 19. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Prologue: Freer than the wind, opened in November.
“For my upcoming show, I’ll be engaging with an ancient format of scroll paintings and, as always, I’m taking the approach from a third-culture lens that is a mix of my Chinese heritage and South African upbringing,” Lee Thorp said.
She contends that the pivotal moment that has most shaped her life and work thus far is becoming a mother.
“It’s the single most reality shifting event that’s happened. Like a swinging door, there’s the me before and there’s the me after. Someone said to me that you give birth to your child and you give birth to yourself,” she said.
With regard to everything she is learning and feeling about her grandfather, she adds that she has a vision to do a singular body of work on that part of her family history. But, she says, the timing has to feel right and very intentional.
“It’s brewing and something I’m envisioning to come in a few years,” she said.
As a young, emerging artist, Yameng Lee Thorp foresees continued growth and discovery. Overall, the artist hopes her work not only unveils her own deeper identity but helps others to feel uplifted.
“I want people to know that even though life is full of twists and turns, it can also be joyful if we choose.”
For more information, visit her website at yamengleethorp.com and on Instagram.
