Gallery 3

Leftside

Safe Space

11 - 22 March

Opening night

13 March | 6 - 8 pm

Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm

ARTIST  STATEMENT 

In Safe Space, Tiffany An approaches portraiture as a negotiated space shaped by trust, intimacy, and emotional consent. The works centre on the artist’s own likeness alongside portraits of family members and close friends — individuals who permit a level of interpretive freedom rarely afforded within traditional portraiture. Rather than pursuing faithful representation, An treats the painted face as a site of projection, where perception, humour, and subjective distortion intersect.

Portraiture, within An’s practice, is understood as inherently sensitive terrain. The act of painting another person carries the risk of misalignment between how a subject wishes to be seen and how they are ultimately interpreted on canvas. Rejecting the expectation of likeness as flattery, An deliberately limits her subjects to those who accept vulnerability and surrender authorship over their image. These relationships establish the conceptual framework of the exhibition: a “safe space” that enables artistic autonomy while maintaining emotional care.

Humour and colour operate as primary agents within An’s visual language. Everyday encounters are reconfigured through exaggerated tonal relationships and compositional distortions that oscillate between familiarity and estrangement. Prior to painting, photographic references are digitally manipulated to test chromatic possibilities, allowing colour to function as an emotional structure rather than descriptive reality.

Materially, An’s process moves between immediacy and deliberation. Paintings begin with synthetic polymer layers that allow rapid construction and reconfiguration of form, supporting an intuitive and responsive approach. Oil paint is subsequently introduced to slow the process, building surface depth and psychological presence through layered detail. This oscillation between speed and duration mirrors the tension between spontaneous expression and relational responsibility embedded within the works.

Through Safe Space, Tiffany An reframes portraiture as an act sustained by mutual trust rather than observation alone. The resulting paintings occupy a space where affection coexists with distortion, and where artistic freedom becomes possible only within relationships capable of holding discomfort, humour, and reinterpretation simultaneously.

ARTIST  BIOGRAPHY

Tiffany An is a Korean-born, Melbourne-based portrait artist whose work explores the subtle absurdities and emotional distortions of everyday life. Working across various media and surfaces, she employs a layered and playful approach—inviting humour, exaggeration and unorthodox perspective into her portraiture to reveal unexpected truths beneath the familiar. Drawing on her immigrant experience and fluid sense of identity, Tiffany’s practice challenges what we recognise as the “normal face,” offering instead a vibrant, strange and revealing encounter with self and other.