Tiantian Lou (b. 1995) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with architecture degrees from Princeton University and the Rhode Island School of Design. With experience in textile and printmaking, Tiantian operates a range of artistic media and utilizes them in experimental ways. Her works has been shown internationally, including Radius Gallery, Hangzhou (2026); Centre of Contemporary Art, Vancouver (2025); Volta Art Fair, Basel (2025); Shu Museum, Beijing (2025); Untitled Art Fair, Miami (2024); Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn (2024); Two Palms Press, New York (2023); LATITUDE Gallery, New York (2022); Milan Design Week, Italy (2022); Chashama Gallery, Brooklyn (2019).

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I was an architecture student for seven years,and while I was drawn to the intellectual side of the discipline, I found myself especially excited by making things with my hands, working with color, and thinking through ideas visually. Over time, I became increasingly interested in the freedom that art offered—the ability to follow intuition, ambiguity, and personal curiosity. After graduate school, I was fortunate to work at a place with an amazing creative community. In many ways, my artistic journey has been shaped by both worlds. Architecture gave me a foundation in structure and form, while my experiences in the art community encouraged me to embrace experimentation and having my own voice.

How do you stay inspired and motivated to create new work?

My art is deeply intertwined with my daily life. I draw from lots of elements from my day to day experience –fragments of text I’ve read or fleeting moments I’ve captured—and let them gradually feed into my work.  I find inspiration in overlooked architectural elements in ordinary spaces,  like building edges, pipes, handrails, or hinges. These details often become starting points for thinking about my assemblies. Beyond these external influences, I really enjoy the process of making itself. My favorite moments are when I can fully immerse myself in the work while listening to an audiobook—it creates a kind of rhythm where thinking and making happen at the same time.

Your practice often questions ideas of structure, softness, and material stability. How do these ideas shape your creative process?

I’m drawn to moments when something feels slightly off—when a structure begins to loosen differently than expected. I think that’s where my interest in softness comes from. I’m fascinated by forms that are supposed to communicate stability and permanence, and I like seeing what happens when those assumptions start to break down. 

In the studio, this often means taking familiar architectural forms—columns, pipes, arches—and pushing them away from their intended function. I make them soft, allow them to sag, or shift. I’m interested in the tension that emerges when a form is still recognizable but no longer behaves the way it’s supposed to. 

That idea also influences how I build paintings and sculptures. I rarely aim for a perfectly resolved composition. Instead, I’m looking for a state of adjustment, where things feel balanced but only temporarily. I spend a lot of time responding to small shifts in form, color, material, and scale, letting the work evolve through those decisions.

Ultimately, I’m less interested in architecture itself than in what these structures can stand in for. They become a way for me to think about how people navigate uncertainty, how systems change over time, and how something new can emerge when familiar forms begin to loosen.

Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

This Spring, I realized my first solo project at Radius Gallery in Hangzhou. I’m really grateful for the entire experience, and very inspired by all the people that I met there. The process allowed me to bring together many ideas that I had been developing over the past few years. 

I tend to think about exhibitions on two scales. On one hand, I see the gallery as a single installation, where individual works become elements within a larger environment. I’m interested in how viewers move through the space and how different pieces relate to one another. On the other hand, each artwork also needs to function as a complete thought on its own. I spent hundreds of hours in the studio developing the paintings and sculptures, allowing them to evolve through making and experimentation.

The exhibition helped me connect ideas that had previously existed as separate investigations. It also taught me a tremendous amount about realizing a solo exhibition—from the initial conversations and planning stages to installation and presentation. 

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

I hope people have an intimate experience with the work and find something that resonates with them personally. A lot of my work explores uncertainty, both spatially and materially. In the paintings, I build environments that can be read in multiple ways through shifts in light, color, and form. In the sculptures, I use soft, pliable materials to challenge expectations about structures that are usually perceived as rigid and stable. Through the works, I hope to create a moment of pause—a space where people can question and form their own connections.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

This summer, I’m giving myself time to experiment and reflect on everything I learned while preparing my solo exhibition over the past year. The process of making that show clarified a lot of ideas for me, but it also opened up new questions that I’m excited to explore.

Right now, I’m focused primarily on my paintings, testing new compositions, forms, and spatial relationships. I’m trying to be more open-ended in the studio and allow myself room for exploration rather than working toward a specific outcome. My goal is to develop a new body of work that builds on these investigations and expands the conversation between my paintings and sculptures. I’m excited to continue pushing ideas around structure, softness, and instability, and I look forward to sharing this new work in New York next year.

Text and photo courtesy of Tiantian Lou

Website: https://loutiantian.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiantianll/