Phaan Howng is a multidisciplinary artist who uses large-scale landscape paintings, sculptures, installations, and performance to stage the sublime and formidable beauty of a post-human earth. Her works initiate dialogues about the current crises of world ecology and negative effects of the Anthropocene epoch. Her cinematic visions figure an “optimistic post-apocalypse” stemming from her sympathy for nature and her disappointment in humanity’s inability to cease, or even slow down its ecologically destructive habits as flora and fauna likewise slowly spiral their way towards extinction. In Howng’s most recent body of work, she imagines the idea of post-nature in unnatural, lurid colors that intensely combine with modern-day warfare tactics such as camouflage, to create environments that conceal themselves as a protection mechanism to confuse unwanted future colonizers and other damaging forces.

Howng works and lives in Baltimore, MD. She received her MFA from the Mount Royal School of Multi-Disciplinary Art at MICA in 2015, and her BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2004. Howng’s recent solo exhibitions and projects include, Phaan Howng, The Succession of Nature at the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD 2017-2018), Niagara, special project for The Long Conversation at the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum (Washington D.C. 2018), You’re In Good Hands, special project for Spring Break Art Show (New York, NY 2019), Effigy, Elegy, Eulogy at Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA, 2018), and Biological Controls: If it Bleeds We Can Kill It at School 33(Baltimore, MD 2017). Howng has also participated in group exhibitions with Art F City; Alt+Esc’s No Vacancy 2, and several iterations of the Re:Art Show. She was also a 2017 Rubys Artist Project Grants in Media Arts and Performing Arts and is a 2018 Sondheim Art Prize Semi-Finalist, 2018 Trawick Prize Semi-Finalist, and 2019 Baker Finalist.