Phaan Howng

Phaan Howng (she/her) is a Taiwanese American artist who creates lush paintings and immersive installations that tease a post-human ecology defensively brandishing its landscape, what she calls an “optimistic post-apocalypse.” Her portraits of dense vegetal matter, appearing both luridly seductive and ominously aggressive, “choke out” the picture plane, obscuring what may lurk behind it to captivate the viewer, just as certain plants seduce pollinators, as well as humans. Inspired by ethnobotany history, Victorian botanical goth literature and the sublime of blockbuster action movies, Howng’s paintings remind the viewer of how plant life is still alien to us and that there is still much more we need to understand and learn about them. Her goal is to challenge the superficial way that we relate to plants, encouraging us to be better ecological stewards and make the changes needed to live in balance with our environment.

Howng lives and works in Baltimore, MD.  She received her BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2004 and her MFA from the Mt. Royal School of Art at MICA in 2015. The artist has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at galleries and museums including the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery through Smithsonian Gardens (Washington, D.C) Dinner Gallery (New York City, NY), PRACTICE (Philadelphia, PA), and MonoPractice (Baltimore, MD), Art in Buildings (New York City, NY), Asian Arts and Culture Center (Towson, MD), and MoCA Arlington (Arlington, VA). Her work has been included in group shows at M+B Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), OCHI Gallery (Los Angeles, CA & Sun Valley, ID), Sean Kelly Gallery (New York, NY), Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum, (Washington, D.C.), and No Place Gallery (Columbus, OH). Her work has been commissioned by CityCenter (Washington, D.C.), American Express Platinum and Meta. Her work has been written about in publications such as The New York Times T List, Smithsonian Magazine, Maake Magazine, Artnet, and the front page of the Baltimore Sun.