Maria Tan, also known as Mica, is a Filipino-Chinese artist whose practice investigates painting as a form of perception made visible. Working from imagination as a primary generative force, she translates lived experience, memory, emotion, and interior landscape into painted form.

Her work begins in the threshold moment of early morning: the instant when color first touches the sky and light appears as surprise. That quality of aliveness, soft yet electric, still yet quietly vibrating, pervades her large-scale canvases. To build these surfaces, Mica turns to the domestic sphere, employing everyday tools such as dental floss, toothbrushes, combs, spoons, and hair rollers as primary mark-making instruments. The gesture is deliberate: to embed painting within the rhythms of ordinary life, and to find the extraordinary within the mundane.

Through layered accumulations of color, gesture, and space, her work arrives at what she describes as the first light experience: deep serenity charged with energetic movement, an immersive environment that surrounds the viewer rather than simply addressing them.