Baker Artist Portfolios

Phaan Howng (she/her) is a Taiwanese American artist who creates lush, vegetal paintings and installations that examine the various historical perplexities within human-plant relationships, particularly humans' desire to control and tame nature. Her work is informed by paralleling ethnobotanical history and literature, ecological research,, with the sublime of science fiction blockbuster action movies and pop cultural trends. Howng uses camouflage, a modern war tactic, depicted in bright, bold colors as a reference to make the plants appear both luridly seductive and ominously aggressive while simultaneously hiding in place. Through armoring the plants and letting them overtake the picture plane, she immerses the viewer into her paintings and materializes them into her installations. She envisions her work as “optimistic post-apocalypse,” a post-human ecology, where plants have reclaimed their autonomy. Howng’s work challenges the superficial way humans relate and objectify plants, encouraging us to be better ecological stewards and make the necessary changes to live in balance with our environment.

Howng lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She received her BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2004 and her MFA from the Mt. Royal School of Art at MICA in 2015. The artist has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at galleries and museums including the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery through Smithsonian Gardens (Washington, D.C) Dinner Gallery (New York City, NY), PRACTICE (Philadelphia, PA), and MonoPractice (Baltimore, MD), Art in Buildings (New York City, NY), Asian Arts and Culture Center (Towson, MD), and MoCA Arlington (Arlington, VA). Her work has been included in group shows at M+B Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), OCHI Gallery (Los Angeles, CA & Sun Valley, ID), Sean Kelly Gallery (New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA), Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum, (Washington, D.C.), and Irene and Richard Frary Gallery, (Bloomberg Center,Washington D.C.). Her work has been commissioned by CityCenter DC (Washington, D.C.), American Express Platinum and Meta. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times T List, Smithsonian Magazine, Wallpaper*, Maake Magazine, Artnet, and the front page of the Baltimore Sun.