Tan Mu (b. 1991, Shandong, China) is an artist whose practice centers on painting as a way of perceiving and investigating systems beyond direct human experience. When reality exceeds the limits of ordinary perception, painting offers a means of giving form to what cannot otherwise be fully grasped. Working across technological infrastructures, scientific imaging, and planetary processes, she investigates how images mediate human perception and shape the ways we construct knowledge of the world.

Her research encompasses submarine fiber-optic networks, quantum computing, glacial environments, satellite imagery, and scientific visualization. Although these subjects differ in scale and nature, they share a common concern with how complex systems become available to human understanding. Through painting, Tan investigates the relationships between the material structures of the world and the ways humans observe, interpret, and construct knowledge of them.

For Tan, painting is both a material practice and a method of inquiry. Maps, scientific images, and technical visualizations are not simply source material to be reproduced, but visual systems whose structures and relationships can be examined and transformed. Through the layering of oil and acrylic on linen, she translates these systems into painterly forms, exploring how information moves between technical representation and material experience, as well as the tensions between visibility and obscurity, abstraction and material presence, and technological processes and embodied perception.

Her ongoing series SIGNAL, Glacier, Quantum, Horizons, and Moon approach these questions from different perspectives. SIGNAL investigates global submarine fiber-optic communication networks, translating their physical routes into painterly structures that evoke both network diagrams and constellations. The series examines the material infrastructure underlying seemingly immaterial flows of information. Her other series investigate how geological, environmental, and cosmic processes become available to observation through scientific and technological systems.

Tan’s evolving Atlas brings together archival materials, scientific imagery, maps, technical diagrams, and observations from research and fieldwork. More than a repository of information, it provides a relational framework through which different forms of knowledge, scales, and modes of observation can be brought into dialogue. Within this process, painting does not simply illustrate research; it transforms research into a visual and material encounter, opening new ways of perceiving relationships that might otherwise remain difficult to apprehend.

Growing up along the coast of Shandong, China, Tan developed an early interest in environments that extend beyond immediate human perception. Her experience with freediving further informs her engagement with depth, spatial perception, and the limits of bodily experience. She studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before receiving a BFA in Expanded Media from Alfred University, New York, in 2015. She currently lives and works in Paris and Shanghai.

Tan Mu’s work has been exhibited internationally. Her solo exhibitions include DAWN, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany (2022); SIGNAL, Peres Projects, Milan, Italy (2022); and Signal and Beyond, BEK Forum (Büro für experimentelle Kunst), Vienna, Austria (2025). Selected group exhibitions include Rusha & Co, Los Angeles (2026); Arario Gallery, Shanghai (2025); ERES Foundation, Munich; Ruttkowski;68, Paris; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Penske Projects, New York; Winter Street Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard (2024); and YveYANG, New York (2023).

Her forthcoming 2027 solo exhibitions include presentations at Uffner & Liu in New York, USA, and Artemin Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan. She has also been invited to participate in the 9th Yokohama Triennale, Whalefall, taking place from 22 April to 12 September 2027 in Yokohama, Japan.

Her work is held in public and institutional collections including The Dubai Collection, United Arab Emirates; the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Spain; the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, United States; the Institute for Electronic Arts, United States; Fairfield University Art Museum, United States; the Central Academy of Fine Arts Collection, China; and the Alfred School of Art and Design Collection, United States.

Full CV and portfolio upon request at tan@tanmustudio.com

For institutional inquiries, curatorial collaborations, publications, and project proposals, please contact Nick Koenigsknecht, who works closely with the artist on the development of projects, exhibitions, and writing. nick@openforum.info