Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann
I examine landscape picture-making by building luxuriant, cinematically scaled paper paintings and installations. These combine romantic, utopian and immersive sensibilities from both Chinese and Western landscape painting with a lexicon drawn from a personal mythology informed by my identity as a biracial, second generation Asian American: ribbons, baubles, bats, peaches, sperm, piles of flowers repeated so many times as to appear biomorphic and alien, but bursting with incongruous efflorescence. My painting practice has two primary concerns: the exploration of landscape painting in a world where "landscape" is defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms, and the insertion of a personal iconography--personal world building, even--into that history.
