Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann
Region: South
With roots in Chinese landscape painting traditions, my paintings
and installations offer a fantastic, abstract vision of the natural
world. My work confronts a challenge: the resuscitation of
landscape painting in a world where “landscape” is represented
and defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic,
and visual formats. How can a painting capture flux, abundance,
waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms?
How can it respond to the pressure we place on our era’s fragile
ecosystem? My paintings explore both questions by sustaining a
tension between the artificial and the natural, the chemical and
the biological, the organic and inorganic.
In my most recent work, I embrace the tradition of landscape
painting, experiencing it for what it has always been: an occasion
for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in
the broadest sense of the term, that sustains us.


