Faya Sanders When Texas-based Vietnamese artist Dan Lam graduated from school, her arts were claimed as being “too pretty”. Instead of rejecting her skills, she decided to push boundaries to see how far she could “get away with making incredible things and what happened to beauty when there was too much of it.”
Dan explained: “I look to the body and nature for cues. I’m interested in creating these bright, attractive things that begged to be held, but either can’t be touched because of the setting, or you can touch them, but they’re hard and spiky making them not so attractive. They remind me of Ken Price in that quintessentially Californian kind of language, but brought right up to date.”
Her interest in these concepts improved with her work and she started searching different avenues and visuals to express those ideas – mainly creating drippy sculptures that are so weird and disgusting, they’re in fact pretty. Crafted using polyurethane foam, acrylic paint, and epoxy resin, the sculptures are intentionally inviting as well as disturbing.
