Artist Statement
Here and There presents paintings from the last two years that explore our relationship to embodied experience in the age of the internet.
We live in a paradoxical time. The internet grants us unprecedented access to one another while causing us to feel isolated and estranged from our physical reality. As digital technologies have become inseparable from everyday life, our experience of the world and ourselves is increasingly shaped through layers of mediation. We work remotely, encounter art through screens, maintain relationships across networks, and rely on digital archives to construct and remember our personal histories.
The default state of being is now to be in multiple places at once, physically present in one location while our attention, emotions, and identities circulate elsewhere. As so much of our lives shift online, the body can come to feel less like an essential dimension of the self and more like something to be managed, optimized, or transcended altogether.
The figures in these paintings navigate this condition. Some appear absorbed in distraction or dislocation; others seek presence through attention to sensation or environment. Between these states lies a range of negotiations between the physical and the virtual. Together, the works explore how we inhabit our bodies in a world that seeks relentlessly to pull us out of them.
Here and There invites viewers to reflect on their own relationship to embodiment. What remains unique, meaningful, or irreplaceable about physical experience? What is worth noticing, preserving, and honoring about life in a body?
About the Artist
Tim Guan is an American-born painter living and working in San Francisco. Though he has been making art for as long as he can remember, he found his way to a committed art practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2025 he left his career in tech to devote himself to painting full time.
Tim’s background in technology and life in San Francisco have shaped his artistic point of view. He is interested in the social and cultural conditions we create through our collective obsession with innovation and progress, and in how those conditions influence the way we navigate our reality and relate to one another. As a resident of the Bay Area for over a decade, he has borne witness to tremendous transformations of public and private life. And as a former "true believer" in the promises of the tech sector, he uses painting to wrestle with complicated feelings about his own complicity in those transformations.
Working figuratively in oil, Tim is particularly drawn to painting because of its ability to hold a material record of human time and energy in a two dimensional object. His direct encounters with great works from art history have shown him the medium’s power to communicate care and attention across time and space.
Against the relentless speed and chaos of modern life, he views this kind of “slow” connection as radical and necessary to preserve our humanity. He aspires to take part in this tradition by making attentive, resonant work that both reflects what it’s like to be alive today and inspires questions about where we’re headed.
Tim studied painting at Studio Escalier in Argenton-Château, France. His work has been exhibited around the Bay Area at Wessling Contemporary, Decentered Arts Studio, The Drawing Room, Rosebud Gallery, and the Triton Museum of Art. You can learn more on Tim’s website and socials at timguan.art.