- For painter and performance artist Emily Tan of Tampa, the arts are a way to express her subconscious and explore her Asian American identity.

(gentle music) - Before I even knew what mental health was growing up, I used art as a therapeutic medium.

(gentle music) My name is Emily Tan.

I am an abstract painter, art teacher, paint performer, and I also DJ.

(gentle music) Growing up on Long Island, I was a child of a Slovakian woman and a Chinese and Filipino man, and my mom had two children before I was born, so they were white and I was a little mixed baby.

And I don't know if that was an identity crisis right away, but I think it's what started the search.

I started painting and drawing and chalk on my entire driveway, like, on every Sunday and Saturday.

I think now the work I've been doing is more childlike.

I was able to tap into that inner child, and I'm using different symbols and things that I used to draw on my planner growing up, but now I'm putting them on a canvas, so it feels like a full circle type of reclaimed power in my art.

(gentle music) The daisy and the mandala symbols are huge in my new work.

I recently did a mural for Cocoon, which is a yoga studio in Tampa.

- So a mandala is something that you can gaze at and it becomes a way to quiet the mind and invoke certain energy.

And this mandala specifically is a mandala for abundance in all of its most positive ways, and peace and spiritual attainment and wealth, all the good things.

And that's essentially a yoga practice in and of itself, to gaze at a mandala in meditation.

- Every summer I teach summer art camp at the Tampa Museum of Art.

- Emily as an art instructor is super enthusiastic and warm and encouraging.

When you walk into that space, you're just hit with all of this creative, positive energy.

It's like a whirlwind in there.

If you've seen her process, you know she's not the neatest artist.

You will always find like some bit of paint somewhere around her from a project, so that's the same vibe you get in her classroom, but the students really, really respond to it.

- The other part of my art that I love doing so much now is the paint performances.

- I love that Emily approaches her art like a yoga practice and that she is devoted to it, and we've been watching her work.

Her working is an art form.

It's beautiful to see be.

(upbeat music) - So I go by DJ Emmy.

My boyfriend Skyler, he DJs and he taught me the basics.

But it is interesting because music has always inspired my art, and now I feel like the art is getting to influence DJing, so it's kind of like a energetic push and pull back and forth.

(gentle music) - It is really exciting to have started to work with Emily when she was an undergraduate at University of Tampa.

To get to know a young artist at that age and see them grow, it's just been really great to have almost like a front row seat to her growth.

And I'm really, really excited for what happens next with her and what more she could bring to the Tampa Bay art community.

(gentle music) - So I think the way I bring my identity in, which I just recently started doing, but I like to call myself the whitest Asian because growing up in New York, I really didn't have any, any cultural background.

So my dad was raised in New York, my mom raised in Harlem, and we were just a very like basic, we're not gonna do any of the cultural, maybe Chinese New Year, but besides that, that was it.

So my grandma gave me my cultural background, the little bits of it that I'm so grateful for.

And my grandma speaks Tagalog.

She's from the Philippines.

She's awesome.

I love her.

She'd bring me to Chinatown.

Like, we had the best times, but that was really it.

So I think my art, it's not really the Asian part.

It's more of the mixture.

So, like, blending two worlds and being in this world as someone that I didn't really have a example of growing up.

I never really saw a mixed person growing up, so I think that is my identity going through and that is what I try to convey in my art.

(upbeat music) What would I say to little Emily?

I would say, "Don't worry, you're gonna be okay.

"There will be people that you can look up to, "and there are people that exist now.

"You just have to find them."

So, I think I found them.

I think I am her now.

(bright music) - [Narrator] See more at emilytan.art.