MIAO TAN: HARDENING INTO FORM

Miao Tan (b. 1998, Jiangxi, China) is a London-based artist working across sculpture, installation, and mixed-media painting. With a background in oil painting and a deep engagement with material processes, Tan’s current practice explores the intersection of gender fluidity, power, and identity formation. Her medium of choice—natural lacquer—holds within it millennia of cultural history, yet in her hands, it becomes a living agent of personal and political reflection.

Tan’s use of lacquer is both poetic and radical. Harvested from lacquer trees and slowly cured through exposure to air, the substance becomes a metaphor for the social and psychological processes that shape the self. She paints lacquer onto soft fabrics—materials that yield, absorb, and conform. But once hardened, they resist. They hold. They bear weight. What was once pliable becomes defined, transformed by time and pressure.

Her sculptures are not only objects but residues of this metamorphosis—records of resistance, traces of constraint, testimonies to becoming. For Tan, gender is not fixed but built up in layers, conditioned by external systems yet still capable of rupture and renewal. Her works embody this contradiction, holding tension between softness and solidity, conformity and autonomy.

In her installations, Tan does not simply represent identity; she enacts its formation. Each piece is an index of struggle, each layer a moment of change. Through the slow ritual of coating, curing, and hardening, Tan crafts a language where material becomes metaphor—where lacquer speaks of bodies, constraint becomes structure, and identity is rendered in form.

They, Them, Their I, 2024

They, Them, Their I is a sculptural monolith composed of over seventy stacked hats, each originally soft and unassuming, now transformed into rigid vessels of memory and force. Coated repeatedly in layers of natural lacquer, the woolen forms absorb the material until they are no longer hats, but something denser, heavier, imbued with pressure.

This transformation is central to the work’s resonance. As the hats cure and harden, they reflect the accumulation of social roles, expectations, and imposed identities. The structure bends slightly under its own weight, a visual metaphor for endurance under sustained pressure—gendered, cultural, systemic.

Glints of gold and silver emerge from within, not as ornament, but as interference—beauty embedded in strain. Through this alchemical process, Tan transfigures the everyday into the monumental. The stack becomes not only an archive of transformation, but a quiet assertion of being: to exist, to persist, to solidify despite it all.

Images: ©Miao Tan, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: MIAO