We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Katherine Tzu-Lan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I currently am able to support myself fully through my studio practice, but that privilege is only because of decades of support, work, and failure. After graduating from college, I taught at the elementary school level, studied abroad and worked as a graphic designer and illustrator before attending graduate school for painting. After that, I supported myself by teaching as an adjunct professor. Now, I pay my bills by combining my studio practice with public art, applications to grants, occasional teaching, and odd illustration jobs.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a visual artist mostly working in painting. I examine landscape painting, environment, and myth making by building luxuriant, cinematically scaled paper paintings and installations. These combine romantic, utopian and immersive sensibilities from both Chinese and Western landscape painting with a lexicon drawn from a personal mythology informed by my identity as a biracial, second generation Asian American: ribbons, baubles, bats, peaches, sperm, piles of flowers repeated so many times as to appear biomorphic and alien, but bursting with incongruous efflorescence. These pieces have two primary concerns: the exploration of landscape in a world where “landscape” is defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms, and the insertion of personal world building—a world of fragmentation, hybridity, and incongruity—into that history.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

The whole point of my practice is the frailty, fragility, and failure inherent in making physical things from my human perspective, so they’re of no interest to me.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Significantly better support for parents and caregivers.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.katherinemann.net
• Instagram: @ktzulan