BIO
Siyuan Tan was born in Fuxin, Liaoning Province in China, in 1984. His memories of his hometown are closely tied to the booming coal mining industry in Northeast China, which is still, to this day, the major cause of smog. He enjoyed painting since he was young and earned his B.F.A. in Sculpture from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, China, and later his M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, GA. Tan’s works are primarily in paintings (2D), sculptures (3D), and a fusion of paintings and sculpture (which he calls 2.5D). Previously, he worked in Detroit as an artist at ID3 Group as Sculpture Studio Manager, and up to the start of the pandemic, he had a daytime job as a Q Studio Clay Modeler at Ford Motor Company. Since the pandemic, he has been dedicating his time to creating works in his home studio in New York. The various working experiences have exposed him to a variety of materials for art and industrial fabrication, which thus led to his usage of media like spray paint in his paintings and sculptures. Tan’s work utilizes tangible media and forms to explore tensions between two coexisting but “opposing” spaces, which he mentioned frequently in the interview, such as “overground” and “underground”, the “positive” and the “negative”. The idea is derived from both Tan’s cultural and academic background. His father, who he referred to as a friend in his upbringing, passed away in his teenage years, making him aware of the imaginative space that co-exists, intertwines, and sometimes conflicts with the physical space he occupies. His practice as a sculptor further deepened his understanding of these two spaces, which the artist describes as a virtual, “nihilistic space” that transforms into the visible—the physical and concrete form that arises during the process of making molds. Through this experience, Tan found that the ensemble of tangible forms bore a vivid resemblance to the abstract relationships between virtual and physical spaces or, in a broader sense, between two confrontational forces.