Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann examines landscape painting, environment, and cultural estrangement by building luxuriant, cinematically scaled paper paintings and installations.
These works combine romantic, utopian and immersive sensibilities from both Chinese and Western landscape painting with a lexicon drawn from a personal mythology informed by her 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.
These pieces have two primary concerns: the exploration of landscape in a world where “landscape” is defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms, and the insertion of personal world building—a world of fragmentation, hybridity, and incongruity—into that history.