Natalie Sze Wai (b. 1997, Hong Kong) is a Toronto-based contemporary artist working primarily in oil painting. Her practice explores memory, migration, discipline, and embodied experience through layered surfaces and recurring motifs such as ribbons, hair, safety pins, curtains, and windows. Moving between abstraction and recognition, these objects form an evolving visual language of restraint, intimacy, resilience, and transformation.

Informed by her background in ballet and scenic art, Natalie approaches painting with an awareness of gesture, rhythm, material, and constructed space. Her practice also extends into installation and spatial interventions, examining how paintings interact with their surrounding environments.

Natalie holds a BFA (Hons) in Scenic Art from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My painting practice weaves symbolic and surreal visual language to explore liminal states of identity, emotional resilience, and the psychological dimensions of belonging. Through an embodied approach to image-making, I investigate how vulnerability, memory, and contradiction coexist within personal and collective experience.

Raised in Hong Kong and now based in Toronto, I engage with the cultural dissonance of navigating diasporic space as an Asian woman. I approach painting not as resolution, but as a site of reflection ,where emotional ambiguity and quiet tensions are held with care. Drawing from lived experience, my work resists didactic narratives, instead favouring atmospheres of slowness, intimacy, and open interpretation.

My current series, Joy Amidst Pain, reflects on the coexistence of beauty and suffering as an inevitable part of human connection. Informed by the Buddhist concept of “緣” (predestined affinity), each work meditates on the emotional afterlife of encounters ,how every moment, whether tender or difficult, leaves a mark that invites transformation.