Freda Tan

Artist Statement

Artist Statement (220 words)

“The universe is not still. Beneath every body, every moment of perception, there exists a constant motion — a persistent exchange of energy that flows through matter and consciousness and binds them into a single, dynamic reality. This body of work calls that condition flux sentience: the understanding that all matter, awareness, and being exist in a perpetual state of becoming. Grounded in quantum field theory, the traditional Chinese Five Phases of Transformation, and Indigenous ontologies that recognize matter as sentient and relational, these paintings propose that the boundary between the animate and inanimate is not natural but constructed. The interlocking forces of Christianity, capitalism, and colonialism have long dismantled sentient and relational cosmologies, replacing ways of knowing rooted in reciprocity with an extractive worldview that renders land, matter, and non-human life as passive resource. Identifying as a Chinese immigrant navigating settler colonial structures, to paint flux is to resist the stillness that representation so often imposes on living experience; to paint the sentient environment is to recover what these systems have long sought to silence. No hard edges exist within the pictorial frame — only the boundary of the panels themselves. Where acute violence sharpens and severs, softness expands and connects. Working between gestural abstraction and representational imagery, the brushwork allows forms to breathe into one another, letting light and line carry energy across surfaces and between canvases. The symbolic vocabularies of fire, earth, metal, water, and wood are legible in the representational works, and felt as energy, colour, and movement in the gestural abstractions. These paintings capture charged moments of elemental transformation, and honour the expansive relationality that makes us whole. ”