Featured Artist July 2017
MissTANGQ
MissTANGQ is a Chinese-American multi-media artist and first-generation mystic-nerd. She is deeply inspired by the hyphenated experience and explores this through animation, installation, and performance art to create cross-sensory and interdisciplinary work. From the many junctions of her identity, she explores the fertile unions where collaboration between seemingly disparate elements can facilitate transformative, emergent experiences. She adapts ancient mythologies for contemporary storytelling and investigates the ways ancestral traditions inform diasporic futurisms. Uniting hand-made and digital mediums, she creates ritual synesthetic experiences for live stage performances and studio art installations.
As an emerging artist working professionally since 2014, her work has been featured in numerous galleries, performance and cultural spaces in Seattle, New York, Hawaii, Mexico and the Bay Area. She has been the recipient of awards granted by Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. She has recently completed an open studio residency with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History as well as developed engaging workshops for the Seattle Art Museum and shown work at SAM's Olympic Sculpture Park.
Artist Statement
Since 2009, I have been working as a creative facilitation specialist and teaching artist serving primarily immigrant and refugee youth and queer people of color. My work serving marginalized communities has deeply informed my art practice. I use the Yi Jing, an ancient Chinese divination tool, as a co-creator in my art process as well as an instrument for collective empowerment. The Yi Jing continues to serve as inspiration for installations, animations, performance and mask-making, where I explore the intersections of nature, the human spirit and mysticism. Through these mediums, I attempt to facilitate the passageway through inner and outer worlds to birth new narratives of being. With the creation of ritual experiences grounded in my cultural tradition, I weave together a tapestry of storytelling, mysticism and transformative communion.
-MissTANGQ
Earth - 坤 Kūn, 2015
29”x25”x12”
Paper mache, acrylic, rabbit fur, willow branches, polyester fabric
Nüwa-Fuxi, 2016
68" x 40" x 9"
Paper maché, acrylic, gold leaf, crushed turquoise, red coral, glass, crushed jet black, rabbit fur, bamboo, wood, dried lichen, moss, burnt leather
Spider Whale Woman, 2016
24” x 17.5” x 6”
Paper maché, mother of pearl shell inlay, blue papua shell, Mongolian horse hair, rabbit fur, acrylic
Stillness -艮 Gèn , 2016
33 x 30 x 10
Paper maché, wool, acrylic, beach sea glass, dried moss, branches