Artist Biography
Derek Tan
Growing up in Burnaby next to the lakes and the Trans-Canada Highway, Derek kept looking at plants and drawing them until he ended up with majors in Biology and Art History.
After jobs photographing several hundred mites and several thousand ethnographic artifacts, Derek became the lead designer at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. Working primarily in watercolour in his art practice, with occasional excursions into food as a medium, Derek investigates the conflicting, unrecognized, and implicit ways in which our lives are bound up in the natural world.