BIOGRAPHY

Hoang Bao Ngan Tran (or Ngan Tran, also goes by Azure Fuzz on all social media), is a digital media artist focusing on illustration and concept art. She was born and raised in Vietnam before coming to the US to pursue an education in digital art in 2017. Ngan attended Evergreen Valley College from 2017 to 2020 and received an A.A in 2-D and Studio Art. In 2020, she transferred to San Jose State University in the midst of the pandemic as an undergraduate Digital Media Art student. She is prospecting to graduate with a BFA degree in Fall 2023. 

Ngan sees the world as a story that only she can see and tell through her works. Her abilities in a variety of digital mediums give her a certain value of freedom in creating her own work. She mostly expresses her contradictory worldview through a range of digital illustrations and character design. Her favorite drawing applications are Procreate and Clip Studio Paint. She also experiments with frame-by-frame animation using those two applications. With Adobe Creative Clouds, Ngan’s experience with the apps is all on an intermediate level. However, she has more works created using After Effects and Premier for all her video editing.

ARTIST STATEMENT

For me, art is where I can freely express my mind. Exploring the differences across media fascinates me.  I am a complex and detailed person, so I want my work to be as detailed as possible.  Mastering all kinds of material is one of my goals as an artist.  The world from my view is a colorful one. Most people would assign a color to one specific object, but nothing is unique in my world. It sounded like I am contradicting myself, it’s just how I analyze life. Everything is influenced by one or more aspects. For example, bees are usually associated with yellow and black for their look, they can also have a hint of orange while pollinating in red flowers. Or like when a pack of lions eating a gazelle, these lions now have a splash of dark red. There is no other best way to capture these color-changing moments other than art.

When the pandemic hit the world, everything around me changed. One of the biggest, and most obvious, changes for me is my mental health. Since March 2020, my mental health has been falling down gradually. Whenever I felt so negative that I don’t think I could handle it, I use art as a way to express myself. I created a digital painting called  Anxiety around the end of February 2020 to address the question “What does anxiety feel like to me?”. Then I brainstormed the ideas: whenever I feel anxious, time just feels like it stops, forever, at that moment. There is also the feeling that makes me think I am lost in the deep dark woods. Breathing seems like a job that I have to control sometimes manually. And some other times my mind is completely foggy. Taking all of that brainstorming and combining it into a singular artwork was a bit of a challenge. I tried to sum it up into 4 emojis: an hourglass, a wilted rose, a spiral, and the loop sign. That is when I started creating digital paintings using Procreate on my iPad. I do recommend people do this every time they feel like they can’t handle their emotions anymore. Just sit down and speak to your true self.