Vessels of Colour: The non-human subject and 'muddled up' senses, with Wei Tan.

Wei Tan’s artwork dips the viewer into a metaphysical realm to allow for an exploration of emotions, senses, identities, and colours. Her current Chairs series probes a surreal menagerie of subjects, including, of course, chairs themselves, along with lobsters, martini glasses, lamps, and more. These objects function as a collection of subjects which vibrate in colourful, surreal settings. The following conversation touches on her artistic practice, her music, and more to give insight into the artist behind the magical vessels.

When did you start working as an artist and why?

Art is something I’ve enjoyed since childhood, but I chose to pursue my education in music. While I was studying Music Technology in New York in 2015, I found myself bringing back elements of art into my music. I started researching image-to-sound conversion and invented an instrument that translates live painting into sound. In my Sound Therapy course, I designed a group therapy that allows people to draw freely on a large piece of paper while listening to a meditative track I composed.

At the same time I was going through a difficult period of emotional turmoil. I was looking for a much more direct and tactile mode of creative expression. I had an urge to simply move my hands and make marks on paper. Then I met my teacher Gina Bonati - a magical 60-year-old New Yorker who paints, dances, acts and sings. We started having abstract painting lessons in her beautiful East Village apartment. The lessons turned into a collaboration and we produced over a dozen large abstract paintings on paper over a few weeks. After I left New York, I decided to give it a go with my childhood passion.

How did you get to your current artistic practice?

The evolution of my artistic practice is marked by my movement from city to city in search for a place to call home.

I spent the first six months after New York painting in an apartment in London, where I used to live in my undergraduate years. I carried on with large-scale, abstract expressionistic paintings on paper, then developed a body of work on canvas, haphazardly combining wet and dry materials like acrylic, soft pastels and oil sticks. I participated in various group exhibitions while searching for a style of my own.

I visited Berlin the following New Year’s Eve. Under the influence of a psychic reader in London, I looked up art schools in Berlin and found a place called Berlin Art Institute, located in a quiet historic area called Weissensee in Northern Berlin. I visited the school and later came back for a short course with artists Ralf Schmitt and Stephanie Jünemann. Through guest talks, studio visits and gallery tours, I learned a great deal about Berlin’s art scene and eventually decided to call this my next home.

Who or what influences you? Has this changed over the years?

I am someone with “muddled up” senses - sight, sound, touch and smell have a close influence over one another. I have synesthesia, which makes me see colour in alphabets and numbers. That is why nearly everything influences my paintings, in a way that is hard to pinpoint. As I work with a lot of spontaneous mark-making and automatic drawing, these influences spill over onto my canvas quite honestly.

I started painting as an urgent need for emotional purging, hence my earlier works were a form of journalling, where I would freely improvise with little structure. After a while, I started to crave a sense of anchor and containment - something to hold on to, something constant amid the freedom. Tangible shapes started to appear in my abstract environments. Then objects would appear, and furniture in my art studio found their way into the paintings.

When I stumbled upon the subject of chairs, I simply transferred the same urge to express into a more symbolic, real-life figure. It created a sense of predictability that was needed in my working process.

What is your art concerned with? What do you want to express?

Whether it is my earlier abstract works or my current Chairs series, I’ve always been trying to evoke an emotional atmosphere, a soup of emotions within four corners of the canvas. The subject matter, though seemingly defined in my Chair Paintings, is never actually the center of focus. The focus is instead in the colour - the subtle shade differences within the same colour space, the unique colour palette of each painting, the nuances in saturation, highlights and shadows.

The chairs and objects in the paintings are simply vessels of colour. That being said, the subject of chairs itself is of course deeply meaningful to me. But my chairs are not the most realistic, nor are they animated, nor are they stylistic like a person’s handwriting. They are in fact quite neutral, and the colours - the flavours - speak through them.

Another important element is composition, which to me is akin to musical composition. In my Rooms series, I arranged furniture across a sea of half-abstract, half-realistic space. The furniture is separate from each other, almost floating mid-air. This act of “arranging furniture in the room” is a more conscious and deliberate version of my free mark-making. And like colour, it is often more important than the subject matter itself in conveying emotional flavour.

Some of your recent works are titled as a ‘self-portrait’, even though they don’t appear at first glance to express the figure literally. To what extent is your art a reflection of yourself? How would you say this manifests in your painting and subject matter?

I continue to learn more about my relationship with this subject, sometimes through other people. At the opening of my solo show in Wiesbaden, Germany last year, as I was trying to explain to someone why I paint chairs, I said to him “I think I am just trying to avoid painting human figures”. In other words, instead of painting human subjects, I have personified the chair. In a podcast last year, the host pointed out that perhaps the chairs in my paintings serve as an anchor to my lack of rootedness that stems from my constantly moving from country to country as a child.

I have essentially replaced the human subject with an inanimate object. To an extent it reflects my somewhat distant and avoidant relationship to people - I am more comfortable painting a chair than a human face, and I have transferred a lot of human emotional value onto these nonhuman objects.

In your new work, there is an element of fun and joy—perhaps even an ironic storytelling through the relationship of objects of everyday life with the surreal and dreamy. It is contemporary and unique. Do you have a particular process when you start a painting? How do you balance the space within the relationship between both the everyday object and the surreal?

My process has become increasingly deliberated now, in which I would actually have a concept of the painting before I start working on it - for example a falling chair, the ghost of a chair leaving its body, or a chair in the middle of a lush forest. However, my favourite way of painting goes back to the old abstract expressionistic ways. I usually start by painting the entire canvas with a background colour. Before it completely dries, I start painting the main chair, referencing pictures I collected over the years. Then in a half-conscious manner, I add in shades, geometrical shapes, and areas within the canvas. Some of these shapes turn into objects, and some stay abstract.

I love exploring the surreal combination of things in one place. Little animals are showing up in my paintings - in particular cats. In a playful way they hide behind the furniture as if they accidentally ended up in this world. Sometimes they are catching a mouse in a messy room or a school of fish underwater. The hint of absurdity and play makes the painting alive, and in a dreamscape, everything goes - and that’s liberating.

Titles of your recent works, such as ‘Every full moon I bleed’ and ‘They found a wine glass and several other things in my ovaries’, have strong associations with womanhood. How do ideas of gender and femininity play into your art? Are these themes you choose to focus on, or are you exploring different inspirations?

I wouldn’t have noticed the associations to womanhood without you pointing them out - which is quite interesting. A few years ago I had a health scare - I had ovarian cysts and they were removed by surgery. It has certainly brought the subject of my femininity to my awareness and so it is revealed in my recent paintings. But in general my work always has a biographical element, stemming from childhood memories and recent events, and I always inject pieces of my personal history into the titles of my paintings.

You are also a musician and play in a band, would you like to tell us a little more about it and how music influences your art and process?

I would say it is a completely separate project and part of my life. I have always liked singing as a child and have been in and out of many music projects throughout my life. In my earlier abstract works, music used to be an essential element in the process of spontaneous mark-making. But right now I would just casually listen to music while I paint. The works in my solo show last year, for example, were painted while I listened to Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas” album on repeat for about a thousand times.

Many people ask if I would ever combine art and music into one, and often more than myself, they seem to like the idea of that - in the form of a sound-art installation or something - but at the moment I love them separately. I much rather enjoy “pure art” and “pure music” in the old-school way - simply looking at a painting or listening to a song.

What are your future projects?

I shot a “zero-budget" film with three young friends in Berlin back in 2021 and I am now going through the lengthy post-production process. It will be a two-hour long feature film - though not at the professional level, it is an unbelievable and precious “lovechild” that came out of the hard labour of four passionate amateurs. I ambitiously dipped my toes into writing, directing, cinematography, editing and film music. This film is easily one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life and I hope it will see the light soon!

Wei Tan is currently located in Berlin, where she continues to create art, film, and music, which ‘muddles the senses’ and dives deeper into the metaphysical realms. With a background in music composition, she completed her Master’s degree in Music Technology at New York University.

ARTE GLOBALE is currently showcasing the solo exhibition ‘Vessels of Colour’, which features Wei Tan’s latest paintings here on Artsy. You can follow Wei Tan and ARTE GLOBALE on Artsy for more updates and information about Tan’s art.

'Vessels of Colour' is authored and curated by Andrea Ellman, a Gallery Assistant Executive at the contemporary art gallery ARTE GLOBALE. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of St Andrews in Art History and English and is currently pursuing her Master's degree in History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford. Especially interested in modern and contemporary art and design, she is dedicated to exploring ways artworks can be integrated with and enrich our everyday lives.