Creating a more inclusive world - Meet Lourien Snoek

Lourien Snoek (23), is on a mission to change stereotypes through her multimedia art pieces in order to create a more inclusive world.

Personal Profile

Name: Lourien Snoek

Profession/studies: Multimedia artist, student of social sciences

Doer/thinker: “I either do too much, or I think too much. However, when I think of it now, I'm definitely an over-thinker. Things either keep up at night, or I just think about something so long that I tend to do nothing with it.”

Party personality: “It depends on the day and the party I’m attending. I can be very silent and observing. However, I can also have this attitude of “go crazy or go home”, and then nothing can stop me from having the best time of my life.”

Favorite party outfit: “I think my favourite party outfit is the 90s, RnB inspired. I like it because it doesn’t restrict my body, it’s comfortable and gives me plenty of pockets to carry the essentials, so I don’t have to bring any bag along.”

Can you tell us, what do you do?

“I study social sciences with the main focus on international relations, philosophy, intersectionality and environmentalism. The subjects might seem broad, and most of them are indeed dry academic data. However, at the end of the day, I also try to draw inspiration from it. I think that my passion for learning things is as strong as my passion for making art. When I make art, I mostly paint, because it’s the medium I have learned and been practicing for most of my life. However, recently I also started doing digital pieces.”

What do you want to convey with your work?

“I think the things I learn at my studies are intertwined with my artistic work. Many of my pieces are very personal and are symbolic of things that I went through at the time or things I could never picture in real life. I also use art to show parts of me that I’m not very confident to share with traditional photos. My self-portraits can be seen as provocative, but they help me to distinguish who I am and what is going on in my mind. When you look at them, I portray myself as a vulnerable but strong person, a woman of colour owning up to her sexuality. People tend to have those stereotypes of Asian women being very submissive. I want to change that with my work.

I also strongly believe that you have academic things, and you have spiritual things, and the spiritual ones are not something that you should define or can define. One of my digital pieces titled “Landscapes I See in My Dreams” is a good representation of that. I truly see this piece as an intersectional representation of women, nature and the divine.”

Portrait: Adrianna Konieczny

“Self-Portrait (2021)”

“The Magical Landscapes I See in My Dreams (2020)”

What do you think needs to change in the creative industry?

“I would say it needs general decolonisation of the system. That’s also something I get bombarded with at my studies. We talk about the creative industry, but it goes the same for almost all the aspects that we struggle with nowadays. All the modern problems originate from recent times when we try hard to validate the types of information that was extremely biased towards European people, towards white people, towards men and the rich. The problems that we’re facing right now are the same things that we’re witnessing in the creative industry. We need more perspectives, new types of art and inspiration. Otherwise, we are never going to get out of the problems that we are struggling with. In my opinion, art is right next to design, how we look, imagine and at the end of the day, envision the future world.”

‘’Art is right next to design, how we look, imagine and at the end of the day, envision the future’’