Wyn-Lyn Tan
Wyn-Lyn Tan’s practice is driven by her desire to make sense of how experiences and emotions shape our understanding of the natural world around us. For her, landscape is not restricted to a genre of painting, but tied to her interconnection with the spaces and places in which she has lived. She considers the journey and an immersive experience of a place as a medium, and much of her work has been based on travels to unfamiliar and distant landscapes in the Northern Hemisphere. Drawing from fields such as geology, alchemy, philosophy and ecology, she seeks to map out the invisible and encourage new perceptions. She is greatly influenced by Eastern philosophies, particularly in the paradox of qi as the life force that is both everything and nothing. Trained as a painter, she has worked in a range of media from canvas, plexiglass and wood to unorthodox materials of patina, metal and soil. Her practice has expanded into installation, video and most recently, the use of artificial intelligence as she questions traditional distinctions between what is natural and synthetic. Wyn-Lyn received her MFA with Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and has been the recipient of the Kunstnerstipend scholarship (2017) and Statens utstillingsstipend grant (2017). In 2011, she was one of two Singaporeans to ever take up the The Arctic Circle Residency. Her works can be found in the permanent collection of the Singapore Art Museum, and have been exhibited in Singapore, New York, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and China, including the Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing.
Tan lives and works in Singapore.
Artworks
Land-scape: Riau III, 2023
by Wyn-Lyn Tan
Acrylic on wood
42 (H) x 220 (W) x 1.5 (D) cm
Land-scape: Riau IV, 2023
by Wyn-Lyn Tan
Acrylic on wood
48 (H) x 240 (W) x 1.5 (D) cm
Comprising soil paintings on large transparent sheets, abstract compositions on shaped wood and video works, Land-scape expands on Wyn-Lyn Tan’s continued fascination with the natural world and her desire to connect with the surrounding environment. Consistent across the presented artworks are plays of light and shadow on rock formations, panoramic landscapes, mountain peaks and water expanses. These works surface her observations on the ephemeral quality of nature that changes according to weather conditions and vantage points and result from Tan’s explorations into forests, old quarries and the shorelines of Singapore over the last few years. Morphing and unfolding between representation and abstraction and the macro and micro, Land-scape evokes the familiar and unfamiliar through a play of perspective, framing and an embrace of the incidental.