Mylen Tumaliuan-Huggins
My practice centers on movement and presence.
Through encaustic, oil, monotype, and mixed media, I move across the surface in a process of shifting, pivoting, repetition, and re-imagination. I work in collaboration with my materials, embracing their inherent qualities — the flow of heated wax, the resistance of oil stick, the translucency created through layered depth.
Movement in my work is both literal and metaphorical. It reflects my lived experience of migration, cultural transition, and the ongoing negotiation between inherited identity structures and self-determination. My marks function as pathways — sometimes deliberate, sometimes emergent — that form spatial relationships through gesture, interruption, and negative space.
I am interested in what happens between things — between line and shape, filled and unfilled space, control and unpredictability.
Nature deeply informs my compositions — not as landscape depiction, but as remembered sensation. The droop of branches, the rhythm of lily pads on water, the eroding edge of land, the ripple left by geese crossing an aquatic surface. These observations translate into marks that hold both direction and openness.
Mylen Tumaliuan-Huggins is a Filipina-American visual artist based in Seattle, Washington. Her artworks are primarily paintings in encaustic, mediums in oil and mixed media on paper, wood or canvas panels. She creates paintings that embody movement as lived experience. Through emergent abstraction grounded in material collaboration, she models a way of being that embraces constraint, cultivates presence, and allows form to arise through attentive action.
Her work contributes to contemporary abstraction by expanding its cultural, pedagogical, and philosophical dimensions — offering viewers not just an image, but a way of seeing.
At the age of 14, she immigrated with her family from the Philippines to the United States in 1982 landing in Toledo, OH, then relocated to Detroit, MI then onwards to Hartford, CT. Her first formal exposure to visual art was when she attended Crockett Vocational School to study Commercial Art during the last two years of high school in Detroit, MI. With her father’s encouragement, she later attended College for Creative Studies - Center for Art and Design in Detroit, Michigan majoring in Graphic Design and Illustration. In 1995, Mylen she moved with her husband from Chicago, IL to Seattle, WA. She has worked as an arts educator for The Children’s Museum, Arts Corps, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Public Schools, as well as an artist mentor for Arts Impact. In addition, she served as a committee and board member for Arts Corps and a contributing art juror for Phinney Neighborhood Association. She was represented at Core Gallery, exhibited at Piano Nobile, The Confluence Gallery, Gage Academy of Art, Phinney Neighborhood Association, Eras Living (The Lakeshore and Aljoya) and Dubsea Coffee.