Cici McMonigle’s mixed-media paintings and sculptures create vivid worlds where Chinese folk traditions, Southern Americana, imagined creatures, and everyday objects exist side by side. Born in Tianjin, China, in 2001 and raised between Tianjin and Lakeland, Florida, Cici draws from memories, stories, decorative traditions, and symbols gathered across both cultures. Her work developed through an interest in psychology and the subconscious, allowing personal experience and spontaneous invention to shape each composition. Through playful figures, saturated colors, and unexpected visual relationships, she transforms these influences into worlds that feel at once familiar and fantastical.

“I find that my work often hovers in the space between my grasp of technical skills and subconscious brushwork that comes from a place of playfulness.”

In her Miami studio, Cici begins without a fixed image of the finished work. She first applies color spontaneously, then builds the composition through freely associated patterns, words, figures, and symbols prompted by her surroundings and the sounds around her. Working across canvas, wooden panels, murals, and hand-carved sculpture, she combines cowboys, animals, flowers, textiles, and imagined characters within a shared visual language.

This intuitive process allows stories from Tianjin and Florida to meet without needing to be reconciled. Chinese folk imagery and American Western motifs are reshaped through memory and play, creating works in which identity appears not as something fixed, but as something continually inherited, translated, and reinvented.

“My paintings do not begin with preconceived notions of a finished product.”

In Makin’ Memories (2026), four cowgirl figures stand against an expansive blue field, dressed in boldly patterned hats, shirts, boots, and chaps. Stars, flames, flowers, plaid, and diamond motifs bring together the visual languages of Western dress, decorative textiles, and folk art, while the figures’ direct gazes and subtle differences suggest distinct personalities within a shared memory.

Through saturated color, flattened forms, and rhythmic repetition, Cici transforms the group portrait into a scene that feels both personal and imagined. The work reflects the central language of Tianjin, Florida, where cultural symbols cross boundaries and gather new meanings through affection, humor, and invention.

Cici continues to expand her imagined world beyond the canvas through painted panels, immersive murals, and hand-carved wooden sculptures inspired in part by traditional Chinese folk toys. First brought together during her Quiet Hours residency and Sabbatikal’s Tianjin, Florida, these works allow her creatures and characters to move into physical space. As painting and sculpture increasingly overlap, Cici continues to explore how stories, symbols, and memories change as they travel between cultures, generations, and forms.

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