Sara Tang

Sara Tang is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker who is currently exploring the intersections of chronic illness, embodied change, ecopsychology, and the sacred in her process and work. You can find them glitching out between being present and dissociating in many of Pittsburgh's liminal spaces.

Sara uses reclaimed and discarded materials and creative processes to illuminate the sacred deeply embedded in our lives and surroundings. Her creative workshops, projects, and collaborations often explore multiracial and multicultural kinship, the power of knowing and shaping our stories, and understanding the complexities of health and wellbeing. Sara’s process is mindful of drawing people in to a deeper empathic encounter with themselves, their communities, and what is strange and beautiful about humanity and existence.

Sara is a member of the #notwhite Collective, JADED PGH Asian American Pacific Islander collective, and is the Digital Content Curator for Anthropology of Motherhood. She also serves on the City of Pittsburgh's Equity Audit Committee and on the Community Advisory Board Council for the Pittsburgh HR/Equity Arts Cohort.

Sara has participated in and co-curated exhibitions at 🅢🅔🅐🅕🅞🅐🅜 creative space, the McDonough Museum of Art, SPACE Gallery in Pittsburgh, ¡Buen Vivir! Gallery for Contemporary Art, Carlow University Art Gallery, the Brew House, Radiant Hall Studios, the Three Rivers Arts Festival, the Dyer Center for the Arts of RIT/NTID, Imagebox, Assemble, Level Up Studios, Black Forge, and UnSmoke Systems Artspace. She has been featured with the Carlow University Art Gallery, Luxe Creative, Local PGH, Mindscapes, folkLAB, Inside Our Minds, the sidewall project, the Abstractions Conference, Our Clubhouse, the National Council for Behavioral Health, Festival of Friendship, WHAMGlobal, VisitPittsburgh, the Firetree Project, and more.

My Process

Exploring with different mediums and forms, I create mixed media drawings, paintings, reclaimed metal pieces, and assemblages that evoke emotional and spiritual experiences. My work tends to reflect the questions and themes being explored in my life and on a larger scale, as I explore the parallels of art-making on the ‘canvas’, and in the ‘self.’

I often blend my morning's leftover coffee into other mediums, steeping in the renewed usefulness of its brown beauty. I usually don't know what will come on the paper, canvas, or wood, but my hands usually know, or the reclaimed object itself evokes an idea for me to work with.

Incorporating the contemplative traditions of the East and West that have formed me, I find the messages of mystics across the world to be harmonious in my life. Processes that are prayers are interwoven like maps, showing us routes, ways of moving, possibilities, our world, home, ourselves, our heritage, and where we are going.

A stone that was used by my father’s family in Thailand to test the purity of gold reminds me of the process of heart-testing what rings true within. I find much of my art process reminds me of the traditional iconography practice of ‘writing’ each stroke of the pencil and paintbrush as a form of prayer.I have found the “writing” of my life to be similar and parallel to this process. It’s not perfect, but it is sacred. Living is my transfiguration.

I’ve become an advocate and culture worker advancing awareness of AAPI presence in the Pittsburgh region through connecting with other local Asian artists and exploring resonance and echos with one another’s experiences. I didn’t grow up seeing people who looked like me as role models or in the media that was available to young people coming of age. Though some parts of my identity were innate, there was so much and is so much I don’t know about my Asian heritage. I explore these realities with other people of the Global Majority through storytelling circles and intimate sharing spaces.

Through research, collaboration, dreamwork, and other practices, I move forward in studying the movements of humanity within my communities, myself, and in the greater ecosystems.