When reality becomes too vast, too complex, or beyond immediate perception, humans begin to paint. From prehistoric cave walls to the present, painting has remained a way of giving form to forces that cannot be directly grasped.

The work of Tan Mu emerges from this enduring impulse. Her paintings engage the hidden systems that structure contemporary life: global communication networks, scientific instruments, data architectures, planetary change, and shifting scales of perception. Rather than treating technology or science as subject matter, she investigates the deeper logics beneath them: how connections form, how information clusters, how time accumulates, how systems self organize, and how perception is shaped by structure.

Her engagement with such systems is rooted in early experiences shaped by the ocean, engineering, and observation. Growing up in a coastal environment, she was exposed to the hidden architectures of the sea, from bathymetric maps to infrastructural blueprints, revealing a world organized by forces that are rarely seen but deeply felt.

Later encounters with expanded media, programming, and sensor based environments introduced a way of understanding reality not as a collection of static objects, but as dynamic networks of signals, interactions, and feedback. This shift remains central to her practice, where painting becomes a means of translating complex systems into embodied visual experience.

Across series such as Signal, Glacier, Quantum, Horizons, Moon, and Mars, Tan Mu transforms infrastructures, geological processes, and cosmic viewpoints into visual fields where macro and micro scales coexist. Submarine cables become emotional and neural maps. Ice records planetary time. Scientific apparatuses become instruments of expanded perception. Horizons become cognitive boundaries.

Working in oil, acrylic, and linen, she demonstrates that painting remains uniquely capable of holding precision and intuition, material presence and abstraction, structure and sensation within the same space.

Her recent thinking increasingly turns toward Geometry, understood not as formal abstraction, but as the spatial logic of hidden relations. At the same time, the cosmos in her work is not a distant elsewhere, but a dimension latent within all things. Her paintings propose that in an age organized by invisible systems, painting has once again become a necessary tool for seeing.

Tan Mu’s practice unfolds through an evolving atlas, a methodological framework that brings together research, archival material, observation, and painting. Rather than serving as a fixed system, the atlas operates as a way of thinking, allowing disparate information environments to be connected, compared, and translated into visual form. Within this logic, painting becomes less a matter of representation than of mapping, where infrastructural, planetary, and perceptual orders begin to appear across shifting scales and temporalities.

Her work develops through sustained engagement with fields such as infrastructure studies, media archaeology, scientific imaging, geography, and climate science. These areas are not treated as subjects to be illustrated, but as conditions to be worked through. Diagrams, field references, technical images, and observational material are gradually absorbed into the painting process, where they are transformed rather than reproduced.

This approach is particularly visible in the ongoing Signal series, which examines the architectures of global communication through submarine fiber optic networks. Here, systems that usually remain abstract or inaccessible are reconfigured as visual fields that move between structure and sensation. The work is also shaped by her embodied experience of freediving, where descending on a single breath alters perception, pressure, orientation, and the sense of time. These experiences inform a way of understanding depth not only as physical space, but as a condition of perception.

Working primarily with oil, acrylic, and linen, Tan Mu engages traditional materials as a means of addressing contemporary realities. Surface, layering, luminosity, and scale are treated as active elements within the work, allowing abstraction and material presence to coexist. Her visual language also draws from expanded modes of seeing, including microscopes, satellite imagery, and scientific visualization. These sources are not directly depicted, but translated into a painterly vocabulary that moves between biological, computational, geological, and cosmic structures.

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. She received her BFA in Expanded Media from Alfred University, New York (2015), and previously studied at 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 participated in group exhibitions at ERES Foundation, Munich; Ruttkowski;68, Paris; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Rusha & Co, Los Angeles (2026); Arario Gallery, Shanghai (2025); Penske Projects, New York; Winter Street Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard (2024); and YveYANG, New York (2023). Her work has been reviewed internationally and is held in major public and institutional collections, including The Dubai Collection, the Carmen Thyssen Bornemisza Collection, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Institute for Electronic Arts, the Central Academy of Fine Arts Collection, and the Alfred School of Art and Design Collection.

Full CV and 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