Berlin-based artist Wei Tan loves chairs. In her combined media work, they punctuate swathes of peach, lilac and aquamarine, suspended in rooms with out corners, or depth. Tan’s chairs supply the dreamer a starting point. They’re one thing of an obsession for the artist. “I found not way back that the phrase ‘obsession’ comes from Latin ‘obsidere’, that means ‘to sit down in entrance of,’” Tan tells me.
Although artwork isn’t her solely obsession. “I’ve all the time preferred each artwork and music,” she says, however as Tan was solely allowed to decide on one arts topic at college, she selected music. After learning Music Know-how at New York College, the place she invented an instrument that “interprets stay portray into sound,” Tan started to include artwork into her music, experimenting with drawing, composition and music-as-therapy. “In any case that I figured that possibly I simply wished to color.”
Artwork opened up for her as a vocation after assembly Gina Bonati, “a magical 60-year-old New Yorker who paints, dances, acts and sings.” Classes with Bonati become a collaboration between the 2 artists. “We produced over a dozen massive summary work over just a few weeks,” Tan explains, crediting Bonati for her experimental strategy to color, and her appreciation for Summary Expressionism. She describes the “limitless” potentialities of this custom, its “too broad” scope. Quickly, Tan wished one thing “extra figurative and tangible.” “I began to include bodily objects into the summary environments of my work. For instance, I’d go searching within the studio and begin sketching mundane objects like tables, vases… then chairs got here into the image.”
For Tan, this motif is charged with emotion and reminiscence. When she moved to Berlin, Tan “was all the time hanging out in cafes throughout quiet hours, and I’d take photos of the empty chairs throughout the room, or outdoors.” In Berlin, she explains, “it’s frequent to see outdated chairs deserted on the streets for the subsequent passer-by to choose them up. Someday I made a decision to color them.” She was drawn to chairs due to their anthropomorphic qualities – “they appear nearly like a human being with arms, legs and a torso.” And like human beings, chairs “take up emotion”; “everybody who sits on a chair leaves a few of themselves behind. An outdated chair, for instance, has years and even a long time of emotional reminiscence.”
After I counsel parallels between her room work and Matisse’s, Tan confesses to being “fairly clueless” about artwork historical past: “I needed to be informed by somebody that my work remind them of Matisse’s room work.” Her influences span Pierre Bonnard, Georgia O’Keeffe and Cy Twombly, plus Susan Rothenberg – “one other one among my favourites” – though music stays a necessary inspiration for Tan’s observe. Her brushstrokes mirror the music she listens to as she paints, and he or she normally listens to the identical album for weeks. Proper now it’s Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas.
Tan’s present solo present expresses her multidisciplinary strategy, and her “sense of indecision, of eager to have each worlds, and a resistance to decide to only one.” My Chair is Having an Out-of-Physique Expertise, on view at Incubartor Wiesbaden in Germany, explores this liminality, providing the chair as some extent of departure for dreaming, feeling and remembering. This present additionally displays Wei’s present preoccupations, as she is “juggling many various tasks and roles directly, and being a little bit of a shapeshifter.” Lengthy might the sport of musical chairs proceed.
