The Daughters of the Silk Roads series is a formal and conceptual distillation of my practice, sparked by the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award 2023. This scholarship funded a transformative research trip to China in Spring 2024, allowing me to reconnect with my heritage and the "Baudelairean" sensory overload of the modern Asian cityscape.

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​Returning to my studio in Edinburgh, I sought to create a dialogue between the traditional culture of my childhood in Hong Kong and the ultra-modern, "Cyberpunk" glow of the 21st-century skyline. In these works, I move between the floor and the wall, using liquid acrylics and fluorescent spray paints to capture the fleeting, theatrical light of the Shanghai night.

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​I am not interested in "history painting" in a literal sense; rather, I aim to distill a sense of time travel. By synthesizing motifs from Tang Dynasty ceramics and Iznik tiles with the cinematic textures of Blade Runner and J.G. Ballard’s The Garden of Time, I construct a world where the past is fluid and navigations are intuitive.

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​Central to this collection is the reclamation of female agency. Historically, women in Silk Road narratives—and within traditional Ming Dynasty scrolls—have often been depicted as restrained or idealized. My "Daughters" are different: they are explorers, navigators, and entrepreneurs. They exist in a state of "Grass Writing" calligraphy—a philosophy where the mark-making is as performative and volatile as the landscape itself.

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​Ultimately, these paintings are a contemplation on our shared global history. I hope this series sends a message of interconnectedness—reminding us that we are all part of a global network with a shared duty of care for our cultural memory and the vanishing landscapes we inhabit.

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Elaine Woo MacGregor February 2026