Wenqing Tan is a Vancouver-based artist currently in her fourth year of the BFA Visual Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Working primarily in oil painting, she chooses painting not because of its historical prestige or medium-specific discourse, but because its process allows her to experience a sense of home and companionship.

Born into a complex relationship with her place of origin in China, Wenqing feels both attachment and distance. She cherishes the food, gardens, and fragments of everyday memory associated with Anhui and Suzhou, while resisting the educational expectations and social atmosphere that shaped her early life. Her move to Vancouver became an escape from a predetermined model of success and the beginning of a different way of living and making art.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Wenqing Tan is currently an art student and practicing artist. She is in the final year of her BFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. Her experience in art education and her previous work as a fashion blogger have allowed her to work across different media and develop experience in project management. Wenqing’s preferred medium is mixed-media painting, and her works are often presented as part of a larger body of work.

As an observer and traveller, she likes to record scenes she encounters in everyday life through walking, plein-air sketching, and photography. At the same time, Wenqing experiences uncertainty around her own identity and culture. She tries to communicate this sense of uneasiness through brushwork, colour, and hierarchy within the image. Wenqing originally intended to investigate marginal spaces, but this idea gradually created a contradictory relationship between the subjects of her paintings and the materials she uses.

Wenqing’s intended audience is other artists from both Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds. Through this statement, she hopes that artists from different cultures can better understand her and her practice.

Wenqing chooses mixed-media painting because the companionship and participation she experiences during the painting process give her a sense of safety. Within this safe and private space, she is able to experiment more boldly with colour, hierarchy, and the canvas itself. She often works with both water-based and oil-based paints, and combines rice paper with canvases prepared with different amounts of gesso. The disorder underneath the surface gives her something like a puzzle to solve through painting. This process reflects her understanding of Laozi’s idea of da xiang wu xing (大象无形), or “the greatest image has no fixed form.”

Wenqing researches art history and philosophy to think about how hierarchies and systems of evaluation are produced. Her practice is also enriched through encounters with other artists, visits to galleries, artist residencies, and travel. Her work reflects an ongoing drift away from meritocracy.