Yuan Tang is a New York-based Chinese multidisciplinary artist who moves freely within photography, video, installation, and print. She started fascinating painting since her childhood years, then quickly developed a passion for photography.
After transferring to the United States, Yuan continues her visual art journey later received her MFA in Photographic & Electronic Media from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017. Currently, she chooses to keep working her creativity in the diverse environment of New York City.
After extensively exploring digital photography and video. From 2018, Yuan has begun to again examine analog photography – producing an ongoing series of intimate scenes – “Vague.” She uses a medium format camera – Mamiya C330 twin lens to capture her idea. Each photo is produced like a small intimate ceremony.
Her subjects, other young Chinese women she has engaged in New York City. Those wonderful women are all foreigners to this country, also far away from their homeland and families who must face isolation, homesickness, language barrels, and face the culture shock of a chaotic in an unrelated city, among many other challenges. Asian women have been loved, fascinated, judged, labeled, discriminated, misunderstand, and underestimated… Nevertheless, they still making voices in different areas want to be discovered. They choose to be temporarily or permanently separated from their native place so that they can entirely accept themselves and comply with their urges and needs. They are reliable and sensitive, conservative and liberal, self-love, and fraternity.
It is often said that everyone is looking for a romantic chapter in New York City – for these women, it does not just the love they investigate, but also a sense of belonging, security, and acceptance in their new rest, new habitats. They have let Yuan peer into their lives, share their journal details, to give her chance captures their vulnerabilities. Yuan feels herself is one of them, as they share not only the same roots and background, but when they are together, she feels whole. The emotional connections are cautious yet progressive, fragile yet severe; they are sensitive and impassive, soft and rigid.