About the Artist
Wei Tan (Malaysia, 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. With a background in music, she completed her Master's in Music Technology at New York University. In 2015, while developing work on image-based sound art, Wei Tan plunged into the world of abstract painting – first collaborating with her teacher Gina Bonati in an East Village apartment, then experimenting on her own, drawing inspirations from the Abstract Expressionists.
Wei’s art began as an urgent act of journaling. Like making soup, materials are thrown onto the canvas and mixed together through spontaneous gesture. Wet paint, powdery pastels and viscous oil clash into each other creating haphazard geographies. The process of automatic drawing allows thoughts from the subconscious to emerge and form a narrative.
In her later work, Wei developed an interest in more tangible forms. This first manifested as “room paintings” that exist between the real and the abstract, where quasi real-life objects – resembling chairs, boxes, tables and vases – float in a sea of abstract gestures. These objects became characters of their own, each emanating a unique emotional signature. In her Chairs Series, each chair seems to carry the lingering presence of a human being and their memories.
Wei’s current work sees a return of her earlier journal-like approach. Scenes from her travels are muddled with impressions from her studio – a gothic church, a giant moth, an old steel lamp, a pair of scissors – reconciling nostalgia with the urgent present. The emergence of bodily forms juxtaposes the cold detachment of objects with the raw texture of human pain. The chair has come to symbolise an unyielding resilience, conveyed by an almost sculptural painting technique, where layers of paint are pushed and moulded into the chair’s form.
In 2020, Wei ventured into filmmaking, leading to her debut feature Loving Lovis, where she took on writing, cinematography, editing, colour grading, scoring and sound design. Wei also fronts the band The Famous Cat Life, a genre she calls “Tarantino shoegaze”, blending surf rock, shoegaze and flamenco influences.