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Dan Lam, an artist and sculptor based out of Dallas, Texas, is pushing beyond the boundaries of modern art, and taking it into a completely new realm. Lam doesn't just want her art to be pleasing to the eye, but rather, reflective of an in-between space between beauty and repulsion; she isn't afraid to admit that her work has a grotesque element to it. Her sculptures consist of bright colors, blobs, spikes, squishes and drips, and have widely grown in popularity all over social media and the world. While attending art school, Lam had a realization that it wasn't enough to make art that was just pretty. It took her rather forward professor to beg the question, "Your work is pretty, but so what?" to cause Lam to look within herself, and her artistic vision. She realized that there is a whole discourse, especially as a woman, that something being beautiful means less, and makes it more shallow somehow. A huge part of Lam's artistic vision has to do with how women experience the world in a certain way with beauty standards being pushed on them at such a young age. She plays around with beauty and repulsion in her art because she feels that in producing something beautiful, whether it be in artwork or one's physical appearance, a person is not taken as seriously. It's simply not enough to just create something beautiful. "What if I just push beauty to the certain point where it becomes ugly, just like a circle?" Lam thought to herself. Aer this, everything changed. She began to create sculptures that embodied this idea, and did so with inspiration from Lynda Benglis, an American sculptor and prominent feminist artist in the 60s and 70s. Benglis did installations in museums, where she would pour polyurethane foam, which is now one of Lam's main materials she uses in her work. VUE ON | DESIGN VUENJ.COM 81

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