This interactive workshop is presented as a collaboration between artists Wen-hao Tien and Johan Lowie, both artists’ practices in contemporary art are rooted in orthodox training in traditions, but different traditions. This event is co-sponsored by the Frederick Book Arts Center, YMCA of Frederick County Maryland, and the Asian American Center of Frederick Maryland.
About Wen-hao Tien
Wen-hao Tien is an artist and educator living in Cambridge, MA. “My practice is rooted in language and cross-cultural observations, explores how identity crosses, merges, and transcends culture. Words (legible or illegible) and everyday mundane objects are my sources of inspiration.”
Her exhibition at Gaslight Gallery (read the press release here) showcases her investigation of a wide range of mundane materials, and how she interprets line, sculpture, painting, and video in the inescapable beauty of nature that was rooted in her orthodox training in Chinese calligraphy and literati painting.
About Johan Lowie
Lowie’s decades of creative work evoke deep, unsettled feelings that come from the frisson of life experiences churning directly against interior wheels of emotion. His images present experience and observation transformed by contemplation. Where a superficial review of his work might determine it to be purely surreal, longer exposure suggests deeply emotional, honest explorations about how we remember our own feelings as we accumulate experience through life.
Lowie’s work challenges viewers, but that challenge gives as much as it takes. Where viewers may first encounter assertive designs and compelling compositions, they soon find themselves forced to reckon with their own relationship to the images. Lowie asks viewers not simply to consume his images, but to digest them, integrate them, and ask themselves why they feel the way they do. In an era saturated with invented, inventive images, that provocative moment of introspection may be the most elusive filter.
Johan is trained in European fine arts traditions.
About Frederick Book Arts Center
The Mission of the Frederick Book Arts Center is to teach the craft and techniques associated with the Art of the Book. Letterpress printing, printmaking, bookbinding, photography, and language arts will be taught through a combination of workshops, field trips, school visits, and classes. All members of the community will have the opportunity to learn, intern, and display work at the Center.
https://www.frederickbookarts.org
About the Asian American Center of Frederick (AACF)
AACF enriches Frederick County by providing the essential tools to equip all immigrants to become independent and successful contributors to our communities and society at large.