Untitled (Owl Mona Lisa)

This portrait stages an owl-headed figure as both sovereign and oracle, its oversized, lacquered eyes holding a quiet intelligence that feels at once tender and unnervingly watchful. Against a field of incandescent yellow, the meticulously patterned feathers and textile-like garments read like devotional ornament—each scale and motif accumulating into a tactile language of patience, craft, and inherited memory. The crossed hands and poised talons suggest restraint rather than menace, a composed self-containment that turns the hybrid body into a meditation on identity: how we dress, perform, and protect the private nocturnal self beneath public ceremony.