A monster is whatever we make of it. It is a mirror for what we fear, what we revere, what we hide, and what draws us towards the strange and the morbid. Monsters are fluid things. They shift in form, expression, morality and meaning. What appears monstrous depends on who is looking, and on where we choose to draw the boundaries of the familiar. I think that is why I have always felt at home among them.

WHAT MAKES A MONSTER?

My name is Louise, though you can also call me Monstress! I am a Dutch-Taiwanese artist with a particular love for Chinese ink wash painting and darker visual worlds.

My relationship with Chinese art began through heritage and curiosity, and grew alongside my studies of China and East Asia. My work brings that visual language together with gothic imagery, biopunk, anatomy, animals and technology. Each painting becomes its own microcosm of cultural fusion, shaped by the different ways of seeing I carry with me.

I have always had a tendency to romanticise the morbid. I am drawn to beauty with something unsettling beneath it, to tenderness beside death, and to bodies that refuse to stay neatly defined. Flesh meets machinery, anatomy fragments and reforms, and ideas surrounding gender, technology and power are deeply intertwined in my worldview and art.

That may be why I have always loved monsters. A monster unsettles the categories we use to make sense of the world while still holding something recognisable within it. It asks us to look twice, to sit with discomfort, and to find tenderness and humanity where we least expect it.

At the heart of all this is a desire to understand. I do not believe we can ever fully step outside ourselves and inhabit another perspective, yet I think much of what makes life meaningful lies in continuing to reach towards understanding anyway. Empathy exists in that movement towards what we cannot completely know, and connection is what becomes possible when we keep making the distance smaller.

We reach each other through the languages available to us. Art is one of mine. More than anything, I create because I love creating. I want to look at the monstrous with tenderness, and keep searching for the humanity within it.