Wyn-Lyn Tan's (b. 1974, Singapore) artistic practice is grounded in painting, and is driven by a visual language shaped through rhythm and intuition. Trained in traditional Chinese ink painting and Western painting, her work has developed a contemporary visual vocabulary that often straddles between East and West. 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, in a desire to chase the ephemeral. Her affinity with the North ties in with her Chinese sensibilities, as she finds a resonance in the vastness seen in the North, with the elusive concept of emptiness in Chinese landscape paintings. She is also interested in the nature of spaces, both metaphysical and physical, and their evocative power. In recent years, her explorations of form, space, light and perception have led to works that question the dichotomy between the two- and three-dimensional.

Her abstract paintings, while contemporary in style, seek inspiration from traditional shanshui hua (山 水画) landscape paintings. Her paintings hover between nature and abstraction, occasionally slipping into the reminiscence of a Chinese landscape. Beginning with a sum of random mark-making, she works towards a place where things no longer feel arbitrary and the work takes over. What begins as a first mark can eventually be obliterated and washed over with a journey of marks that suggest a constant dialogue between artist and canvas. An extensive use of water in her painting process, also often result in works that recall the alchemy of ink on rice paper.

Wyn-Lyn has been the recipient of the Kunstnerstipend scholarship (2017) and Statens utstillingsstipend grant (2017), the National Arts Council (NAC) Capability Development Grant (2013), NAC Arts Professional Development Grant in Visual Arts (2011) and Emerging Artist Grant (2003). She has been awarded artist residences with Herhusid Artist Residency, Iceland (2013), and Fiskars Artist Residency, Finland (2007). 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.

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Photo Credit: Shawn Low