Tan Mu (b. 1991, Shandong, China; lives and works in Paris) 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 practice is structured through an atlas, a methodological system that links research, archival material, and painting. The atlas serves as a comparative and diagrammatic framework for analyzing heterogeneous information environments, including submarine cables, glaciological imaging, cellular microstructures, and cosmic visual data, and for translating them into a visual form. Within this logic, painting operates not as representation but as a mode of mapping, where infrastructural, planetary, and perceptual orders become co-visible across different scales and temporalities.

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 Studio Manager Nick Koenigsknecht at nick@openforum.info

Tan Mu’s practice bridges painting with research in science, engineering, and systems of observation. Her work moves between fieldwork, computational processes, and studio production, integrating scientific methodology with artistic intuition. Rather than treating technology as theme or tool, she approaches it as a form of inquiry. Different modes of knowledge, visual, technical, and experiential, inform one another and shape the logic of her paintings. This interdisciplinary orientation places her practice within a broader continuum of efforts to understand and respond to complex environments over time.

Tan Mu Studio operates as a research-driven platform dedicated to the development and realization of her work. The studio supports long-term collaborations with scholars, designers, and researchers in both the humanities and sciences. Functioning as a laboratory and production site, it integrates experimentation, archiving, and publishing into a practice that bridges scientific inquiry with public engagement.