Born in China in 1997, Yongqi Tang attended the University of Washington and received a B.A. in painting and drawing in 2019 and an M.F.A in 2022. She is the recipient of the Bernie Funk Artist Scholarship, Boyer and Elizabeth Bole Gonzales Scholarship for Excellence, and the Puget Sound Group of Northwest Artists Scholarship Award. She also was the artist in residence at the Field Projects Gallery, NY.

“Having studied and worked between China and America, my works have been influenced by the drastically different cultural and ideological contexts of the two countries. Interested in how the interaction with the environing world would affect our existence, I question and deconstruct my roles in both private and public space by investigating the social construction of identities through the act of painting and drawing. My works examine the fluidity of our self-images and relate to the broader human experience of the ambiguousness of identities such as gender, sexuality, and nationality. The objective of my works is to reinterpret the categories into which we are born to rearticulate the discourse around them. My studio practices involve a variety of materials such as oil, watercolor, acrylic, and charcoal.

Using the dining experience as an entry point, my current works examine the ambivalence to be in the liminal state between the alienation from my country of origin and the displacement at the current settlement. The works inspect how Chinese immigrants see themselves through the concepts others have of them and the groups they belong to, and perform identities under the impact of the surrounding conditions. Identity, therefore, becomes a duplicated phenomenon – people are both themselves and a project they make of themselves.”