Over the next few weeks, SVA will be highlighting some of the many outstanding projects by 2018 Alumni Scholarship Award winners. First up is BFA Illustration student Ora Xu on her project "There Are SO Many of Us," which explores the challenges of self-expression and the pressures of society through a series of surreal oil paintings.

Tell us about your project. What inspired the idea?
My thesis project represents social and individual struggles coming to terms with the question of what comprises human experience. I aim to capture intense emotions that should be interpreted within a moral and cultural context. Freud said that an individual's ambition can never be fully satisfied in civilization, so the individual must choose between pursuing their passion with hardship or compromising for civilized life. As I consider my identity and find similar struggles echoing in society, I want to visualize the challenges we all face with paintings of representational creatures and objects placed in bizarre fairytale environments. In this series, I created fish with human torsos dying on eerie lands as a metaphor for people who struggle to challenge themselves. I intentionally made all the paintings with beauty and harmonizing color, to reflect the fake impressions people put on to mask their true feelings. As viewers spend more time on each painting, they will hopefully start to notice the less-pleasing, eccentric details.

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"I want to visualize the challenges we all face with paintings of ... bizarre fairytale environments."