Anna Tjan
Anna Tjan is a Chinese-German artist, illustrator, and poet based in London. Her visual work, closely intertwined with her creative writing, is predominantly created digitally but also incorporates watercolors, gouache, and pencil drawings. Inspired by nature, her art features recurring symbolism and a growing vocabulary of icons and emblems, often populated by strong women. She is deeply interested in exploring the (often) fraught notions of womanhood.
Tjan received her BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2001. Her work has been published in magazines, on greeting cards, and other stationery products. In 2023, she completed her first mural.
www.annatjan.com
Who and/or what are your influences when you were first starting out vs. Now?
I have loved art and crafting since childhood and was supported by my parents who arranged for me and a friend to take a weekly art class with a neighbor who was an art teacher. Her name was Helga Kolb and she was a big influence as I studied with her through my high school years and decided to pursue art at university. As a teenager I discovered Keith Haring and Nan Goldin, whose art worlds seemed so exciting and vibrant to me, like a promise of a bigger experience. After my art degree life took me in many different directions (I worked in publishing, ran a record label, co-founded a picture framing studio, joined the rate race of the corporate world and started a family) and it wasn’t until the pandemic turned all our lives upside down that I picked up my art materials once again. Since then, art making, illustration, and more recently poetry, have once again become an integral part of my life. These days I am influenced by the community of artists I have met through Instagram. Some I have met in real life, some are scattered across the globe – their community spirit has carried me through the swoops and turns of the last four years. I visit and re-visit the works of artists and illustrators like Eniko Katalin Eged, Rithika Merchant, and Moki Cherry often. On a recent first time visit to Barcelona I learned to re-appreciate the work of Joan Miro and got to see Keith Haring’s AIDS mural from 1990 in situ. His work is no less powerful to me 30 years after discovering him.
What is your favorite thing about the material/s you use?
I like to say I am a digital artist with an analogue sketchbook. I love using watercolors, gouache, pencils, pens, and markers of all stripes, but with a young family, time and space is limited. Working digitally, mostly in Procreate on my iPad, has liberated my art practice and lowered the barrier to creating consistently whilst spinning a lot of other plates. I approach a digital drawing or painting very much like I would a traditional piece on paper – I carefully experiment with and choose the brushes I use and create color palettes that are unique and suit the personality of each piece. Each brush stroke is hand-made and carefully considered.
What would you say is hidden just underneath the surface of your work? Meaning, what are you revealing to your viewers?
Women and the experience of women in our world is a continuous theme in my work as is an exploration of the poetic, mysterious, and mythical. I think I like to ask more questions about what lies beneath than provide answers. There is never just one answer and many different stories hold truth. When I start a new piece of work, I don’t always know what lies hidden underneath the surface, but the possibility of finding out one of the many nuances is exciting to me as an artist. In the same vein, I hope that viewers uncover multiple layers that may peel away to reflect something familiar or strange, perhaps a memory, perhaps a desire.
Can you tell us about a turning point in your practice? Was there a moment when things started clicking?
When I was an art student at college in the late 1990s, beauty was frowned upon as something decorative with no meaning. As I returned to art twenty years later, I thankfully understood that the two are not mutually exclusive. I am now an unashamed seeker of beauty. I hope some people might find my art decorative enough that they may want to hang it in their homes. This does not make it less meaningful or challenging.
In honor of our women’s issue, who are three women and/or gender nonconforming artists that inspire you?
Madge Gill is a self-taught artist local to where I live in East London. She created the most astonishing body of work whilst being a nurse at a local hospital in the first half of the 20th century. Her work, often created with her inner spirit-guide called Myrninerest, spans drawings, paintings, and textiles. A couple of years ago, inspired by her work, I drew faces for the first time which led quickly to drawing human figures, something which I had previously convinced myself of being incapable of doing.
Last year I took a class by Deborah Stein and I came away shaken and bursting at the seams with inspiration. Not only did she challenge me to loosen up and let go of some tightly held preconceptions and self-limitations, but I started writing poetry which has directly fed into my visual practice.
The re-discovery of poetry has led me to seek out new and old poets. Mary Oliver stands out with her words of wisdom and her questioning, themes of nature, and how we may find our place amongst it all.
