Yongqi Tang
Field Resident, July 10 - August 21, 2022
Artist Statement
Having studied and worked between China and America, my works have been influenced by the drastically different cultural and ideological contexts of the two countries. Interested in how the interaction with the environing world would affect our existence, I question and deconstruct my roles in both private and public space by investigating the social construction of identities through the act of painting and drawing. My works examine the fluidity of our self-images and relate to the broader human experience of the ambiguousness of identities such as gender, sexuality, and nationality. The objective of my works is to reinterpret the categories into which we are born to rearticulate the discourse around them. My studio practices involve a variety of materials such as oil, watercolor, acrylic, and charcoal. Using the dining experience as an entry point, my current works examine the ambiguousness to be in the liminal state between the alienation from my country of origin and the displacement at the current settlement. The works inspect how Chinese immigrants see themselves through the concepts others have of them and the groups they belong to, and perform identities under the impact of the surrounding conditions. Identity, therefore, becomes a duplicated phenomenon – people are both themselves and a project they make of themselves.
Biographical Statement
Born in China in 1997, Yongqi Tang attended the University of Washington and received a B.A. in painting and drawing in 2019 and an M.F.A in 2022. Her artistic practices involve a variety of materials including but not limited to oil, watercolor, acrylic, and charcoal. She is currently working and living in Seattle, Washington.
TANG’S PROJECT:
During the residency, I plan to continue the investigation of identity performance by completing the third drawing of the Eat Drink Man Woman project. To be consistent with the two drawings I have completed, the third drawing would be the same size and medium. The project examines how Chinese immigrants perform their identities to achieve acculturation through the focal point of the dining tables. The first drawing of the project (The Apartment) is about the displacement I experienced in America, and the second one (The Wedding) is about the alienation from my motherland; the third drawing would tackle how I could resolve the identity struggle during this period of turmoil through understanding death. As I saw and heard people around me, including my grandma, passed away in recent years, I felt that only through my relation to my death, I could understand my existence, so that I could reject the performance and arrive at authenticity. More specifically, I would investigate the food and dining ritual around death, such as the funeral, and the tomb-sweeping day in China.
Field Residency
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