Atlas
Atlas
Research archive by Tan Mu @tan.mu.atlas
Physical objects from the artist’s personal collection, collected as part of an ongoing practice
Tan Mu’s Atlas functions simultaneously as a research archive, method, and ecosystem within the artist’s long-term practice.
As an archive, it gathers printed matter, technical documents, imagery, and historical materials related to technological, biological, and planetary systems—from submarine cables and data infrastructures to glaciers, mapping, and scientific imaging—forming a concrete record of how knowledge is produced and how the world becomes intelligible across disciplines.
As a method, the atlas structures processes of observation, comparison, and transformation. Materials are not referenced, but dismantled, re-organized, abstracted, and diagrammed. Painting becomes a site where these fragments reconfigure into visual systems; each work operates not as a singular image, but as a partial map unfolding across time, scale, and memory.
As an ecosystem, the atlas expands horizontally with new research fields and future bodies of work. Signal is one branch within a broader topology that will incorporate glacial, cosmic, biological, and infrastructural dimensions. Rather than defining a theme, the atlas provides the long-term structural logic through which disparate domains can coexist, interact, and evolve.
Conceived as an atlas-in-progress, the project remains open, cumulative, and recursive—a cartography of thinking, sensing, and making.
