Miao Tan ARWS is a London-based mixed-media artist working across sculpture and painting. Her practice is driven by exploring materials and perceiving their intrinsic qualities. She believes that close observation of material behaviours offers a new way of understanding the relationship between the body, time, and social structure.
Whether in works on paper or sculpture, her practice is a continuous inquiry into the agency of materials. In her painting on paper, thoughts and actions are inseparable, engaged in direct dialogue with the material. In her lacquer-based sculpture, this same inquiry takes a slower, deeper form. The slow, layered, and irreversible transformation of natural lacquer catches her attention. She is fascinated by the flexibility of this material, its openness to being shaped and reshaped throughout the process, and its transformation into an almost unbreakable state once set, observing how fluidity and solidity coexist within the same substance. For Miao, this paradoxical coexistence metaphorically echoes the way bodies, gender, and identity are shaped and gradually solidified through social construction.
Her work has been exhibited at Mall Galleries, OXO Gallery, Bankside Gallery and featured in Aesthetica and The Cold Magazine. She is an Associate Member of the Royal Watercolour Society (ARWS), elected in 2025, and a recipient of the RWS New Graduate Award 2023.