Nancy Tien

Master of Fine Arts, Performance
James Nelson Raymond Fellowship Recipient

Bio

Education: 
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Performance SAIC 
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and minors in Anthropology and English, University of Florida

Awards/Achievements: 
Summa Cum Laude, University of Florida 
James J. Rizzi Scholarship

Exhibitions: 
Big Screen Project, Eventi Hotel, New York, NY 
Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL 
Betty Rymer Gallery, Chicago, IL 
Gallery X, Chicago, IL 
Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland

Publications: 
Artnet 
Architrave 
Muse 
F Newsmagazine

Experience at SAIC

We were always encouraged to experiment, to test our limits, find our boundaries, and redefine them. It was simultaneously frightening and exhilarating. After coming to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), my practice developed to allow space for play, which helped me to find new ways of generating performance actions and reconsidering how to engage with everyday life events, like eating.

Personal Statement

I am a second-generation Chinese American woman from Miami, Florida. Interested in seeing distance in intimacy and intimacy in distance, I create work that finds distances that bring us closer. Because my work is steeped in and tied to my own personal relationships, with a focus on my romantic partner, Wesley, and my parents, my work comes forth out of my everyday life. Utilizing duration, endurance, and task-based performances as a way to blur life and art, my work allows for avenues of living, doing, acting, and thinking that I would not be able to explore, question, or engage with in my day-to-day living.

I plan to use my Fellowship to go to Taiwan so that I can continue working on a project I started this January, under the title Dui Niu Tan Qin (To Play the Lute to the Cow). The project will exist in two forms: as a life-performance work, and later, as a video work. Diu Niu Tan Qin is a project that seeks out the way I want to live and allows the means for me to realize it. Through the lengthy process of relearning Mandarin and opening up communication between my family and myself, the work addresses issues of the immigrant experience, race and racism, assimilation, and U.S.-China politics via the lives of my family, all of whom—save my parents—have returned to live in Taiwan within the past five years, after residing extensively in the U.S.

Current Interests

I am currently trying to find the way I want to live through my work, which for me, means finding the way I want to live in the world with you.

Often working with the intensely personal and from the weakest parts of myself, I strive to bring the private out into the public and make the private okay to talk about in the public, so that the personal doesn’t always have to hide behind a mask.

I am particularly interested in race studies, Asian American studies, and postcolonial theory.