DISSOLUTION IN THREE ACTS | Angela Tang-Tan

© Dissolution in Three Acts. Angela Tang-Tan. ImageJ

“The neuroscience lab yields moments of surprising beauty. I created these images using skeletonization in ImageJ, which strips photographs of cultured brain cells down into their barest binary features to illustrate connections between cells. The first panel shows the dense architecture of healthy brain cells grown in my lab, while the subsequent panels show the decay of these connections as environmental toxins are introduced. These striking organic forms tell a story of fracture. As toxicity rises and the network erodes, the neurites retract into themselves: a metaphor for the decay of connection within modern medicine and our social structures. These images remind us that, whether at a microscopic or macroscopic level, the integrity of the collective depends on our ability to remain connected.”

Angela Tang-Tan is an avid artist and writer as well as a neurosurgery resident at Oregon Health and Science University. She completed medical school at Keck School of Medicine of USC and double-majored in neurobiology and psychology at UC Berkeley. She served as an ambulance EMT during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tang-Tan’s short stories, poetry, nonfiction pieces, and visual art have appeared in Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and the Examined Life Journal. Her piece “Top Surgery” was included in Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine and nominated for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Essays 2025. In 2026, her piece “Two Thoracotomies” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.