Anne-Joelle Tan: Humiliation as Image Logic
When the screen becomes a body
Anne-Joelle Tan – Painting & Image-Based Practice
Anne-Joelle Tan works with painting as a site where circulation leaves residue. Based between digital debris and material insistence, her practice takes images that have already been handled, compressed, misused and turns them into slow surfaces. Wrestlers, burning cars, lace, soiled denim, Craigslist remnants. The vocabulary is familiar, but the arrangement is not.
Her work operates through friction. Low-resolution screenshots, YouTube stills and marketplace listings are transferred, layered and partially buried under oil, toner, screenprint and encaustic. The “poor image” is not referenced nostalgically but structurally. Compression becomes texture. Misplacement becomes composition. Shame is not narrated, it is staged. Viewers are placed in a narrow zone between attraction and discomfort where looking feels complicit.
Tan’s background in meme culture remains visible as a logic rather than a style. Circulation, repetition and mutation shape how her paintings function. The boundary between public symbol and private fragment dissolves under wax and pigment. What remains is not clarity but pressure. The screen goes dark. The afterimage lingers.
Notable Artworks and Studio views
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