Mei Lin Tan
- Practice
- Ceramic Artist
- Based
- Singapore
A Singapore-based ceramic artist tracing migration, domestic memory and the quiet intelligence of materials.
A practice built through attention.
Mei Lin Tan begins each vessel with a conversation: with the clay, with inherited kitchen objects, and with stories carried across generations. Her practice moves between functional ceramics and sculptural installations, treating touch as a form of cultural memory.
Working slowly in a former provision shop, she mixes local mineral traces into porcelain and records the small changes made by heat. The resulting surfaces resist perfection; they hold time, weather and the evidence of a hand at work.
“Clay remembers pressure. I am interested in what our hands leave behind before language arrives.”
Work as an evolving archive.
Borrowed Bowls, 2026
Monsoon Table, 2025
Nine Kitchens, 2024
Tan gathers oral histories before touching clay. Each interview is translated into a constraint: a weight, a repeated gesture, a firing temperature or a colour drawn from a remembered room.
Her studio operates as an open archive where test tiles, failed firings and annotated family photographs remain visible beside finished work.
Opened her first shared kiln studio.
Began the ongoing Nine Kitchens oral-history project.
Presented Monsoon Table across Singapore and Penang.
Featured in AWA’s Hands of the City series.
Interview & editing — AWA Editorial · Photography — Sample imagery · Translation — AWA
Suggest an update
