Treasured Bearing

Dolby Chadwick Gallery presents Treasured Bearing, an exhibition of recent work by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, on view from November 6 to 29.

“There is room in our lives for flights of fancy,” Mann insists, and her collaged landscapes take her at her word—lush, unapologetic escapes. Each painting develops an intimate visual language, rich with stories and references drawn from her personal and art historical canon. The result is a demimonde abundant with coexisting contradictions.

Through her intricate world-building, the body becomes both a threshold and a reservoir—holding the energy of growth and release. Flowers do not simply decorate boundaries; they surge forth, evoking birth, expansion, a living edge against the cloud rafts behind them. At the nexus of this erratic, maximalist tempo lies ritual, echoing the Taiwanese practice of second-burial, honoring the dead through careful gathering and handling of bones. Here, the remains carry weight beyond the body, becoming anchors that tether the living to those who came before.

Each painting begins with a pour of sumi ink across paper. This unbounded, gestural mark becomes both chance encounter and anchor, from which all subsequent decisions unfold. The ink may be subsumed by the residents of the mise-en-scène, as in Double Gui, or persist as a loose shadow, as in Tide. Atop this base, painted rice paper is cut using the meticulous, time-intensive technique of traditional Chinese paper cutting, jianzhi, and collaged alongside segments of sumi paintings from her childhood in Taiwan. Layers of ink, paint, and watercolor accumulate into rich, arcane foliage and abstracted anatomical forms. Fragmented yet continuous, these elements expand across the composition, containing the body while simultaneously releasing it into a hybrid realm: mutable, buoyant, adrift.

A floating world unfolds in Mann’s practice where birth and death converge. Whether through vessel motifs that course across her dreamscapes, or through the coupling of flora with mythic beings, the constructed universe is one of enchantment, steeped in cultural memory and ancestral resonance. In the eponymous work of the series, Treasured Bearing, bamboo leaves shoot outward in linear, directional gestures—assertive, almost spear-like from within an amniotic darkness, while ivy unfurls in softer, circular forms. Gather the Remains depicts a womb now within an urn: life is held in temple vessels. These paintings hold shadows—both vast and contained—in which we ask who we are, what we carry into being, and where we travel once released from the flesh that shelters us.

If these carefully crafted dreamscapes provide the rhyme scheme to the work, Mann conducts the tempo. In Froth and Spume, black tendrils of ink speed across the page only to be cut off by contemplative renderings of mussels and clams. Time stretches in the details, then snaps tight as yellow streaks across the page. In Double Shen, the beat shifts again: two eyes stare back at us from among a garden of orchids and peonies, assuming the abilities of the shen-a clam in Chinese myth capable of creating shapeshifting illusions. The lace-like intricacy of Mann’s mark-making, combined with a solemn, omniscient eye, inhabit a space between perception and presence, inviting us to confront how the boundaries between the living, the remembered, and the imagined are porous and intertwined.

Treasured Bearing reckons with what is inseparable from life itself: death. Across its shifting, magical terrains, flesh and bone emerge as both remnants and markers of presence. Mann’s paintings hold constraint and freedom in delicate balance, dissolving boundaries of form into vessels that contain memory, spirit, and the quiet human impulse to hold what slips beyond understanding.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and earned a BA from Brown University in 2005 followed by an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright to Taiwan and a residency at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Mann has exhibited across North America, Europe, and Asia, including most recently at the Kreeger Museum in Washington D.C. and the Walters Museum in Baltimore, MD, and her work has been cited in the Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, Art Ltd., and Hyperallergic, among other outlets. This will be her third solo exhibition at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.