Megan Tan

Megan is a visual artist with a vocational background in accountancy. She has a BFA in Visual Art from Victorian College of the Arts, a BFA Honours from Monash University and a Graduate Certificate of Professional Accounting from RMIT University. She has received a Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship, a National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association Award and the Daniel Dorall Prize. Megan’s essays have been published by Melbourne art imprints Discipline and un Projects.

The AFNGA AusArt Scholarship has supported Megan's MFA in Art at University of Illinois Chicago, where she is developing a thesis on printmaking and conceptual art’s potential for impactful monetary interventions. Her research is informed by Chicago’s history as a centre for trade in the Midwest and the birthplace of neoliberalism.

Can you tell us about the kind of work you make?

My work has almost always been image based. It has been drawings, paintings and video but has been installation and conceptual art when the idea calls for it. While at the University of Illinois Chicago, I have been using e-paper devices to create new kinds of ‘poor images’ (the way that Hito Steyrl means it). E-paper renders digital images into degraded, lossy versions whose effect comes from the surface’s tendency to screen burn easily. Curiously, these surfaces consist of electromagnetically charged ink particles rather than pixels. It’s a substrate that attracts commentary from discourse in printmaking, publishing, new media and moving image and could potentially spur new visual art discourse.

I’m also preoccupied by how artists have engaged with markets and how someone in the United States would continue that lineage of work right now. That aspect of my practice is in a more nascent stage of development.

How do you produce these ‘poor images’?

The starting point is often sitting down with my e-paper tablet, running playback of video, laying the screen face-down on a photo scanner and making about 20-50 scans. From those scans, I choose one to three that I'm compelled by the most, and turn them into prints on paper through screen printing or a large format inkjet printer. I will usually adjust my device’s settings to maximise the ghosting effect as the screen is being scanned.

Is there a work to date that encapsulates your practice?

I think Levigator* (*see basement) 2025 synthesises the last few years of my practice quite well. A levigator is a tool that grinds an image off a lithography stone’s surface in preparation for a new print. They cost between US$200-500 so my encounter with one being used as a door stop in the UIC School of Art and Art History basement, where the printmaking department was scrapped a few decades ago, was an irresistible invitation to make fun of this discrepancy between the object’s utility and its market value. Elsewhere in the school basement was a small lithography stone living in the same condition of surfeit as the levigator, so I cleaned that stone and screen printed a halftone photo of the doorstop/levigator onto it.

Levigator* (*see basement) is symptomatic of my recent ruminations about fundraising model deficiencies and is yet another of my many attempts to make a very powerful image, in the formal sense but also in the way power is begotten by an image’s social narrative. Incidentally, it’s a very site-specific work. It dies if you try to remove it from UIC’s School of Art. It dies if you move the levigator, which is the halftone photo’s subject matter, from the building. Perhaps it will die when the levigator is used as a lithography tool once more.

What has been a formative experience for you as an artist?

The prohibitions of lockdown in Melbourne induced a revelation about how I had been working up until that point, which was two years after I finished my BFA program at the Victorian College of the Arts and two years before I took an Honours year at Monash University. The work I made was really contained to illustrative image making. I can’t recall exactly how it happened but I got some clarity about my ambitions. I learnt that I really did want to be an artist. Before then, I think I was reticent to critically engage with the world. I think the paradigm shift I experienced was solidified by watching people and policy struggle to impossibly keep up with the Covid-19 virus, in the sense of containing its spread and mitigating its social and economic consequences. The pandemic was and is still horrific, yet I don’t know if I would still be an artist if it never occurred.

How do you see your practice evolving?

I see it enveloping more disciplines. I already write for publications occasionally and I would like to edit and publish in the future. Organising and teaching outside of the classroom is also on the cards.

What's the most inspiring thing about your time at the University of Illinois Chicago?

One thing is the prowess of the faculty. I wish I could speak as well as my professors do.

Facilities are modest at the school but the people here are innovative, determined and generous to each other when working around their material limitations. I’m so grateful for the camaraderie of my cohort.

How has the Aus Art Fellowship supported your endeavours?

Studying at any school in the United States would have been impossible without the AusArt Fellowship unless I were going to a program with a full scholarship and stipend package. They exist but are very competitive in the major cities. Plus, I really wanted to come to Chicago because of its history as a finance centre, so that narrowed the pool of potential programs dramatically. There are so many moving parts to planning and realising study in an MFA program in the States as a foreign national and having funding in time for my first semester was the most challenging aspect. The fellowship covers practically all fees that I owe to UIC over my two years here, which affords me the privilege of lots of solitary studio time and the ability to do graduate study as a full-time occupation. People at American Australian Association and American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia have been very generous with moral support too as I navigate the uncertainties of coming to the States as an international student this year.

What have you experienced or had access to in the United States that you wouldn't have in Australia?

In a lot of MFA programs in the states, teaching assistant positions are offered and I will be undertaking one in my second year. That's an opportunity which isn't offered to postgrads in Australia until PhD, since that's the terminal degree of the academic studio art path outside of the US.

There is also the historical financial district in downtown Chicago which I am researching for work that’s soon to come. When I transfer trains on my way home from the studio, I pass the Chicago Board of Trade Building, the old Arthur Andersen headquarters and the Federal Reserve Money Museum. All of those sites are possessed by seismic events (and horrors) in fiscal policy that inform economies everywhere. It’s vital that I encounter them in person and work in dialogue with other professionals who are engaged with these sites and histories.

Applications are now open for the 2026 AusArt Fellowship. Find out more via the American Australian Association website.