Sachin Teng

Dropping out of college, roughing it in motels, working up a mountain: the US artist tells Gary evans about the high and lows of a roller-coaster career.

- Gary evans

Sachin Teng hadn’t been to bed for six days straight. She was busy preparing for a show – Pratt Institute’s notorious end-of-semester exhibition known as Survey. Everybody from the college was going to be there and, more importantly, so were the people from the Society of Illustrators. Sachin was flagging. She decided to have a power nap, another of the hour-long snoozes that kept her going this past week. She finds an empty classroom, makes a bed out of a couple of drawing benches, and closes her eyes.

Before Pratt, Sachin worked mainly in monochrome, pen or pencil drawings, still-life, line art. In 2007, she enrolled in communication design, focusing on illustration, but during her first year she almost failed a couple of classes. The New York college made her realise she wasn’t as advanced as some of her peers.

In the past, teachers preached lofty ideas about art: what art was, what art did. They said all the stuff Sachin was into – comics, movies, video games – that wasn’t real art.

Pratt believed otherwise. Communication design was a fancy way of saying commercial art – art for money. Here teachers taught Sachin how to get clients, run a business, market herself. They showed her how to do the one thing every working artist must learn to do: pay the rent. They set tight deadlines because tight deadlines are the reality of art for money. The Survey event was Sachin’s chance to put this into practice.

The artist woke up from her hourlong power nap and saw the classroom was now full. A group of sophomores were in the middle of critique session. The students left Sachin to sleep because they were all in the same position: busy preparing for Pratt’s end-of-semester exhibition.