Artist Bio

missTANGQ was born in Chongqing, China and immigrated to the US when she was 4 years old. She describes her experience growing up bi-lingual, cross-cultural and queer as a process of diasporic alchemy: navigating plural realities and becoming a multidimensional explorer. Before working as a full-time artist, she worked as an educator and community activist. Her cultural work led her to study Chinese metaphysics and philosophy as instruments for individual and collective healing. She draws upon the wisdom traditions of her heritage to explore the intersections of nature, the human spirit and mysticism. These themes also reflect the queer and immigrant experience as it seeks to transform what has been inherited by society into an undertaking of self-creation. Through her artwork, she facilitates the passageway through the inner and outer worlds to birth new narratives of being.

As a full-time artist working professionally since 2014, her work has been featured in numerous galleries and performance spaces in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, the Bay Area, Hawaii, Mexico and China. She has been the recipient of awards granted by Artist Trust, 4Culture and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. She has completed residencies with the SOMArts Cultural Center, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and Xucun International Art Commune in China. Her most notable recent performances have been at the Fort Mason Center for the Arts, Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA. Since 2020, she has completed permanent public art installations in Washington, Oregon, California and Massachusetts.

 

Artist Statement

I am a Chinese-American multimedia artist and first-generation mystic-nerd. I am deeply inspired by the hyphenated experience and I explore this through sculpture, animation, installation, and performance art to create interdisciplinary work. From the many junctions of my identity, my art explores the fertile unions where collaboration between seemingly disparate elements can facilitate transformative, emergent experiences. I adapt ancient mythologies for contemporary storytelling and investigate the ways ancestral traditions inform diasporic futurisms. Uniting hand-made and digital mediums, I create ritual synesthetic experiences for live stage performances and studio art installations.

I use clay, paper-maché, textiles, and organic materials harvested from nature and repurposed objects to construct wearable sculptures that fuse cultural traditions, ancient divination practices, numerology and symbology, animism and cosmology. I believe that activating multi-dimensional perception creates new possibilities within our imagination, remixing our past, current, and future to understand ourselves and our potential. 

Since the age of 6, I have practiced Chinese folk dance and am currently studying movement techniques based on Yin-Yang philosophy under the tutelage of Lily Cai. In my own performance work, I use new interactive media and video installations to create ceremonious experiences that migrate between time, the subconscious and imaginative realms. Aimed at healing modern disconnections between self, others and nature, my performances aim to re-unite the sacred into urban life. Through the creation of new rituals grounded in my cultural lineage, my goal is to weave together a tapestry of storytelling, co-creation, and transformative communion.