Tan Mu (b. 1991, Shandong, China; lives and works in the United States) is a contemporary artist whose research-driven practice examines the hidden infrastructures of technology, data, and signal shaping contemporary life. Working primarily through painting and visual systems, her work investigates how global structures intersect with human perception and collective memory.

Combining traditional oil painting with expanded visual tools such as microscopes, satellite imagery, and scientific visualization, Tan Mu operates at the intersection of technological history and embodied experience. She approaches technology as both an extension of the body and an externalized form of memory, developing compositions that interweave biological, computational, and cosmic structures—from embryos and neurons to logic circuits, quantum computers, data nodes, and celestial bodies. Through this layered visual language, her work translates abstract systems into lived experience, bridging the visible and the invisible.

Her ongoing Signal series examines the invisible architectures of global communication through sustained engagement with submarine fiber-optic networks. Informed by infrastructure studies, media geography, and human perception, the series translates these hidden systems into visual constellations that move between abstraction and representation. The work is fundamentally shaped by Tan Mu’s embodied experience of competitive freediving, where single-breath descents into depth recalibrate perception, pressure, and orientation. Rather than treating communication networks as purely technical structures, Signal approaches them as carriers of collective memory, cultural history, and human connection. By linking planetary scale with individual and shared experience, the series maps time, distance, and presence within an increasingly networked world. Works from the series have entered international collections.

Tan Mu holds a BFA in Expanded Media from Alfred University, New York (2015), and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2011). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at Peres Projects (Berlin and Milan, 2022) and BEK Forum (Vienna, 2025). She has been featured in group exhibitions at the ERES Foundation, Munich; Arario Gallery, Shanghai (2025); Penske Projects, New York; Winter Street Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard (2024); and YveYANG, New York (2023). Her work has been critically reviewed by international publications including Artnet News, Mousse Magazine, and Numéro Berlin, and is held in major private and institutional collections.

Selected Collections 

A.R.M. Holding Art Collection, United Arab Emirates
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Spain
The Institute for Electronic Arts, United States
Central Academy of Fine Arts Collection, Beijing
Alfred School of Art and Design Collection, New York

Full portfolio upon request at tan@tanmustudio.com

For any inquiries about the artist’s work, including exhibitions, institutional collaborations, media, or project proposals, please get in touch with Nick Koenigsknecht at nick@openforum.info

Tan Mu’s practice spans multiple fields of technological and human inquiry, integrating painting with research-driven engagement across science, engineering, material studies, and systems of observation. Her work moves fluidly between analog and computational processes, long-duration fieldwork and studio-based production, drawing equally from scientific methodology and artistic intuition. Rather than treating technology solely as a subject or tool, she approaches it as a mode of inquiry, allowing different forms of knowledge, visual, technical, and experiential, to inform one another. This interdisciplinary orientation situates her work within a broader continuum of human efforts to understand, measure, and respond to complex environments over time.

Tan Mu Studio operates as a research-driven platform dedicated to the development and realization of her artistic practice. Spanning painting, installation, sound, and expanded visual systems, the studio fosters long-term collaborations with a network of scholars, designers, and researchers across the humanities and sciences, including those affiliated with leading biotech and physics institutes. Functioning as both a laboratory and a production site, the studio integrates experimentation, archiving, and publishing into a practice that bridges rigorous scientific inquiry with public engagement.