Cici McMonigle’s (b. 2001 Tianjin, China) creatures don’t simply emerge—they erupt. Fanged, feathered, or glowing, her beasts inhabit a world at once primal and psychological, ancient and newly imagined. Raised between Chinese and American cultures, McMonigle paints from the fertile crossroads of fable and fantasy, where childhood memory, folklore, and pop culture intermingle in dazzling excess. Her works fuse traditional Chinese motifs with the unruly color fields of Western cartoons and surrealist gestures, creating a charged visual language that is as playful as it is confrontational. Drawing inspiration from Chinese folk toys, mythological archetypes, and her own subconscious, McMonigle’s characters channel a form of cultural hybridism that refuses to be tamed. These monsters—wild, bright, and unnervingly human—become avatars for the complexities of identity, diaspora, and belonging. In McMonigle’s hands, the monstrous is not something to be feared but embraced: a site of transformation, release, and coded storytelling.Her visual world resonates with traditions of automatism and expressive figuration, echoing the legacy of post-war movements like CoBrA while anchoring her vision firmly in the present. As part of a new generation of artists redefining figuration through myth and multiplicity, McMonigle invites us into a landscape where boundaries dissolve and meaning is negotiated through the surreal.
Cici McMonigle is currently based in Miami, where she is a resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. She has exhibited her work at the NSU Art Museum, KDR, and Latitude Gallery. She studied Fine Art at Parsons.