Tiantian Lou described her sculptural process as “really fun” more than once during my morning visit to her light-drenched Gowanus studio. Surprises are inevitable as she translates two-dimensional plans into three-dimensional forms, merging textile and architectural logics by folding and sewing together painted canvas panels. Interspersed among her similarly vibrant paintings, these densely patterned sculptures range from her earlier vessel-like objects to her more recent scaled-up forms, which seem vaguely infrastructural in their geometric modularity.
Standing next to a columnar form roughly her height, Lou described her ongoing interest in liminal systems engineered to go unnoticed within the built environment. For her upcoming solo exhibition in China this spring, she envisions installing wall-based sculptures in unconventional configurations reminiscent of HVAC systems. At the same time, though, Lou complicates such utilitarian associations through the softness of these canvas constructions, which subtly sag and warp over time. As she puts it, the sculptures “develop character,” with their visible seams recalling her hands-on process.
Lou’s architectural sensibility reflects her formal training as an architect. During graduate school amid the pandemic, she shifted her focus toward painting as a site of spatial inquiry. Her paintings dovetail with her sculptures in seeking to soften the linear austerity of geometric forms, while evoking infrastructural motifs—grids, scaffolds, partitions—without resolving into stable architectures. In these characteristically colorful compositions, Lou enacts tension between crisp, tape-defined edges and more fluid, biomorphic shapes, which seem to spill from rectilinear containers. Elements subtly protrude and recede without adhering to a consistent spatial logic, complicating any stable sense of depth or orientation. Appearing at once resolutely flat and curiously dimensional, these works, animated by visible brushstrokes, recall familiar perceptual metaphors—painting as window, portal, or screen—while destabilizing such frameworks. Lou routinely paints onto the edges of the canvas, pushing beyond the conventional boundaries of the picture plane.
On a table in the corner, a three-dimensional model of the gallery for her upcoming exhibition crystallizes her spatial attunement, exceeding any particular work. Lou routinely moves between the familiar architectural formats of the sketch, the plan, and the model, considering how each piece operates within space in relation to the body. Her painting process typically begins with simple line drawings during her subway commute to and from her day job in Lower Manhattan, where she works in a printmaking studio, often preparing color studies for other artists. This routine, she notes, inevitably shapes the energetic palettes of her own paintings, which intensify the dimensional interplay among forms, reinforcing her prevailing interest in how rigid architectures might be softened and otherwise reimagined as more open-ended, perhaps provisional systems.
