ART Habens Art Review // Special Issue ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #89 | Page 41

Tatawa (Wei Tan)
ART Habens
there with everything else. This crude
lack of thought helps me limit my
already overtly open-‐ended painting
process. The way I develop texture is
by throwing things I like onto the
canvas and hoping that they work. Only
in the very last moments do I make
some logical decisions on how to finish
a painting. However, to my amusement,
the less thought I put into finishing a
painting, the better it turns out, which
is very good news to me, since my
intention is to indulge in thoughtless
spontaneity for as long as possible and
to be surprised by the eventual
coherence that comes out of it.
Visually, the more obvious stylistic
influences are Cy Twombly, Joan
Mitchell, Philip Guston, and Helen
Frankenthaler. And then there is a
whole list of childhood influences from
the likes of Chinese calligraphy which I
learnt as a child, to Japanese manga
which I practiced as a teenager. On a
daily basis I am influenced by the
hundreds of fellow artists on my
Instagram feed – among them, Caroline
Denervaud’s dance–art, Iabadiou Piko’s
raw scribbles, Eser Gündüz’s intimate
sketchbooks, Dokkanmama’s story-‐like
Japanese calligraphy, and Matías
Sánches’ lunatic painted figures.
Another vital influence is the music I
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