Artist Statement

What are the tangible and immaterial threads that tie us to our ancestors, and how are these distilled throughout the diasporic community? Can reclaimed cultural practices transmute colonial legacies and empower shared narratives of joy, beauty, and pride? In her debut solo exhibition at re.riddle, entitled Warp/Weft, Filipina-Chinese-American artist Charlene Tan delves into the realm of cultural simulacra and the poetics of materiality. Developing her own visual language, the artist reinterprets traditional Filipino tribal weavings in her mosaic-like compositions. She intertwines indigenous signifiers and generational craftsmanship with contemporary digital processes, bridging the distance between herself and her ancestors.

Tan’s raw materials include foods and vivid pigments evocative of The Philippines, where she spent her childhood and her formative years. Tapioca pearls are self-contained diasporic manifestations—stemming from the Brazilian cassava root, often misidentified as Asian in popular food culture. The artist’s use of tapioca pearls in her dense compositions results in a texture reminiscent of intricate beading, invoking her grandmother’s hand-beaded embroidery—a commonly overlooked painstaking manual labor that often defines the immigrant experience. The work also incorporates ube (or purple yam), a root regularly associated with Filipino cuisine, offering a vibrant purple hue that Tan uses as a pigment affixed to a digitally printed pattern, creating a visual and tactile motif in low relief. The patterns Tan creates are a synthesis of traditional motifs originating from two distinct regions, Manila (representing her mother) and Bicol (representing her father), with each possessing its own ethnic identity. However, visual data is lost with each scan, alluding to the degrees of erasure and a kind of native de-assimilation that accompanies separation from one’s ancestral home. 

Traditional cuisine and clothing are a conduit for immigrants and second-generation communities to connect with their respective origins, honor their heritages, and construct a blended social ecology. Tan acknowledges the symbolism of these materials while reconfiguring them as an integral part of her contemporary visual and sensorial lexicon, a respatialization of the humble domestic labor of textile production. Through her research methodology and multi-layered process, Tan investigates the space between the metahistory of pattern design and the laborious physical act of weaving her chosen materials into new systems of meaning, a muscle memory of cultural expression that resists colonial narratives while reimagining a plurality of diasporic futures.