Developing her own visual language, the artist reinterprets traditional Filipino tribal weavings in her mosaic-like compositions. She intertwines indigenous signifiers and generational craftsmanship with contemporary digital processes, bridging the distance between herself and her ancestors.

Tan’s raw materials include foods and vivid pigments evocative of The Philippines, where she spent her childhood and her formative years. The artist’s use of abalone and freshwater pearls in her dense compositions results in a texture reminiscent of intricate beading, invoking her grandmother’s hand-beaded embroidery—a commonly overlooked painstaking manual labor that often defines the immigrant experience. The patterns Tan creates are a synthesis of traditional motifs originating from two distinct regions, Manila (representing her mother) and Bicol (representing her father), with each possessing its own ethnic identity. However, visual data is lost with each scan, alluding to the degrees of erasure and a kind of native de-assimilation that accompanies separation from one’s ancestral home.