(Washington, DC. b. USA)

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann (b. 1983, United States), is a visual artist rooted in abstraction and the Chinese ink painting tradition. Her paintings feature both highly wrought, decorative elements as well as organic, chaotic forms, exposing the inherent paradox of the painting process. Mann starts each piece with stains of color, products of chance and accident. These early marks provide the building blocks for complex networks of imagery, coaxing from this organic foundation the development of diverse, decorative forms: braids of hair, details from Beijing opera costuming, lattice-work, sequined patterns. Although founded in adornment, these elements are repeated until they too, appear organic, even cancerous, as they at once highlight and suffocate the underlying ink stained foundation.

My work's abstractions arise from the subjects I portray: ecological and geological cycles, processes of chemical corrosion and natural efflorescence. With roots in traditions of Chinese landscape painting, my monumentally sized paintings and installations evolve a fantastic, abstract vision of the natural world. My latest work confronts the 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 forms. 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 tension between what is artificial and what is natural, between what is chemical and what is biological, between organic and inorganic. The paper on which I paint is not only a recognition of a tradition of Chinese painting; it is also a medium of vulnerability and expansiveness, susceptible to crease and tear as well as to collage and collation. My own role in the creation of the paintings strikes a balance between the purposive and the protective. I trust to process, chance, and change, but I encourage, direct, and facilitate all of these. In my mostrecent work, I hope to live in 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. - KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann

(Washington, DC b. USA)

Education

2009 Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. MFA, Hoffberger School of Painting

2005 Brown University, Providence RI. BA with Honors and Magna Cum Laude: Visual Art.

2005 BA with Magna Cum Laude: Education Studies

Selected Collections

MGM National Harbor, Oxon Hill, MD

POD Hotel, Washington, DC

Hamline University, St Paul, MN

Montgomery College, Rockville, MD

DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, DC

US State Department, United States Consulate, Dubai, United Arab

She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2017.

Katherine Tzu Lan Mann