Tan Mu’s ongoing Signal series is a sustained artistic investigation into the invisible architectures of global communication. Grounded in infrastructure, media geography, technological poetics, and human perception, the series transforms submarine fiber-optic networks into symbolic “digital constellations”—bridging abstraction and representation, emotion and system. Mu reimagines these hidden infrastructures not merely as technical constructs but as vessels of collective memory and human connection. By fusing planetary systems with individual and cultural histories, Signal creates poetic diagrams of connection and rupture, mapping time, scale, and collective presence.

First debuting at Art Basel Miami 2024, with subsequent works exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong and Art Dubai in 2025, the series will have its first comprehensive solo exhibition this Fall at Vienna's BEK (Büro für experimentelle Kunst), featuring paintings alongside live musical performance.

The ocean and Stars

Contemporary Landscape of Global Interconnection

This regional series of creations begins from Tan Mu's hometown, using the coordinates of personal emotion to unveil the prologue of a global narrative network.

"My relationship with the ocean began with childhood memories of the coastline." Growing up along the Shandong seaside, Tan Mu's mother was among China's first windsurfing athletes. The rhythmic tides and deep-sea tranquility she experienced while exploring nearshore waters on sailboats with her family as a child became her earliest signals for perceiving the world.

In Signal: Submarine Network 01 (2024) depicting the Northwestern Pacific waters, the crisscrossing submarine cables form signal conduits connecting Tan Mu's home province of Shandong, China with regions like Korea and Japan, sketching a picture of information interconnectedness. Beneath layers of blue washes and star-like points, her brush revisits these vivid individual memories of exploration, pioneering, connection, and disconnection.

When we gaze at the flickering points of light in the blue depths of the painting, it's as if we're viewing a celestial map of the digital age. These points of light are both a distant response to ancient mariners gazing at the stars and a revelation of the invisible structures upon which modern society operates—a deep-sea galaxy woven from data, signals, and algorithms. In this contemporary landscape of global interconnection, signal represents the artist's contemplation and questioning of technological nodes and epochal transitions.

Diving into the Ocean

Connection of Personal Memory and Emotion

From the very first painting in the Signal series, Tan Mu pieces together her intimate and profound connection with the ocean. Her poetic understanding of the sea, combined with childhood moments spent alongside her grandfather, converged into a fascination with hidden undersea infrastructure and the structure of world.

Her grandfather, a marine engineer involved in port design and land reclamation projects, always had his desk covered with intricate bathymetric charts and structural diagrams. Through these blueprints marked with numbers and symbols, Tan Mu understood from an early age that beneath the seemingly free waves lay an invisible order carefully constructed by humans. This unique perspective of growing up allowed her to maintain a romantic, star-like longing for the ocean while developing a systematic understanding of submarine infrastructure.

The gigantic foundations of seaside oil wells, stacked containers in ports, and the distribution of submarine network junction points—these "oceanic backbones" typically inaccessible to most people became recurring visual motifs in her artistic creation.

Her passion for freediving further opened a window to dialogue between her inner self and the ocean. Holding her breath while descending, with her body suspended at the point of neutral buoyancy between rising and sinking, Tan Mu describes her diving experience as entering a meditative space like an alternate realm, as if floating in a vast and peaceful universe.

This became the unique perspective presented in the Signal series.

A temporary memory loss caused by a diving accident unexpectedly initiated her contemplation on memory connections and disconnections. The memory blank resulting from oxygen deprivation made her brain seem to lose its signal connection with itself.

This unique experience led her to link memory systems with signal systems, giving her new insights into the structure of memory transmission and the fragility of information carriers. 

For Tan Mu, the ocean serves both as a container carrying collective memory and a codebook for interpreting memory structures—when underwater cables, like the nervous system in the brain, transmit human civilization's data packages at the speed of light, these nodes and pathways transmitting collective memory become another storage medium for Earth's memories.

Beginning from her hometown waters, Tan Mu uses her distinctive artistic perspective to interconnect submarine cable nodes with global networks, with each piece of work collectively sketching out the complex map connecting humanity. This makes the series not merely a depiction of geographical and technological landscapes but also a reflection of emotional and memorial trajectories.

Hidden Structures

Collective Memories Transmitted Through Cables

Tan Mu's focus on submarine cables began with personal childhood memories, then gradually evolved into a series of creations following an incident of signal disruption. 

In January 2022, the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano triggered intense undersea tremors, completely severing the country's external communication cables. The disconnection of signals even prevented the outside world from knowing about the volcanic eruption, causing this South Pacific island nation to "evaporate" from the global network within mere hours, becoming a literal information island in reality.

"As a freediving enthusiast, I had always dreamed of whale watching in Tonga. That sudden disconnection made me realize for the first time that what sustains our modern information world isn't satellites, but rather the deep-sea data cables hidden beneath the ocean," Tan Mu recalls.

After Tonga repaired its underwater cables and restored communications, she created Eruption (2022), depicting the Tongan volcanic eruption while documenting the impact of this geological disaster on global communication networks. This work serves both as a commemoration of rebuilt connections and a warning about disconnection. Eruption planted the conceptual seed for the Signal series, prompting her to question: What is this "signal" we depend on? How does it lose its voice in crisis, and how does it echo back in another form?

In her subsequent work Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (2023), Tan Mu shifted from specific events toward a more symbolically significant global carrier—submarine cables. Borrowing the title from Jules Verne's classic novel, the work compares modern technology to Captain Nemo's Nautilus, diving into unknown deep-sea territories. These fibers carrying floods of information are physical channels for data transmission; their cross-sectional structure metaphorically represents the convergence of cultural, economic, and social traces, and even deeper connections within collective memory.

After completing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Tan Mu expanded her creative focus from single geographical events to the global network system. From the cross-sectional structure of fiber optic cables to regional maps, from technological logic to human emotion, she uses painting to construct a visual field where information flows and signal disruptions coexist.

This establishment of a panoramic perspective prompted her to begin creating the Signal series—presenting the complex connected landscape of global information networks through canvas. In the Signal series, submarine cables are not merely channels for data; each cable is a "signal line" interweaving emotion and information, viewed as both recorder and transmitter of humanity's collective memories and emotions.

Points and Lines

Signals, White Noise, Starry Sky, Labor

In Tan Mu's studio, works from this ongoing creative series are displayed. For her, painting resembles a slow and continuous process of signal collection and redrawing—simultaneously a record and a construction.

Through the artist's labor, the temporality and emotion of signals are translated into physical traces on canvas. With precise composition, she maintains tension between abstraction and representation, arranging cable nodes like constellations, creating resonance between technological symbols and natural imagery within the same picture plane.

Layers of overlapping blue washes construct deep realms where ocean and night sky merge. Each flickering point of light is composed of pale blue, light purple, and pure white, like distant stars emitting faint light in digital streams.

Upon closer inspection, one can sense that every brushstroke is deliberate rather than random, having undergone repeated covering, adjustment, and erasure, bearing traces of time's sedimentation.

The pathways of the silent messengers of the deep are placed on this canvas where sea and starry sky blend, with nodes marked in gold or white, resembling metal contacts embedded on a motherboard. These structures attempt to respond to a world driven by data yet full of fault lines.

Points and lines become the core visual language of this series. The points of light are both data packets traveling through the digital ocean veins, "white noise" in digital currents, and resonances of emotion and memory within frequency oscillations. The lines depict both the actual routes of underwater neural networks and echo the trajectories of ancient mariners who relied on celestial bodies.

Using submarine cables as a nexus, Tan Mu weaves the rationality of data flows, the tension of geopolitics, the trajectory of technological evolution, and the fluctuations of individual emotions into a visualized narrative network. 

Behind every brushstroke on canvas lie the calculations on engineers' drawings, traces of seabed operations, sparks from workers' welding, and the artist's emotional flows—the Signal series is a visual narrative of humanity constructing an invisible star map in the deep sea, a form of astrology about the information world.

Mapping

An Evolving Cartography of Regional Nodes

Through the medium of underwater cables, Tan Mu deeply explores the cultural narratives, geopolitical dynamics, and technological developments of various regions.

Due to differences in oceanic topography, technological thresholds, labor intensity, and construction timeframes, the global submarine network presents itself as an unbalanced "stellar distribution."

This celestial map of the digital age not only reflects the coverage of today's global information networks but also tells a story about connection and disconnection, convergence and dispersion.

The Signal series ingeniously combines this regional expression with exhibition practices. 

The first work debuted at Art Basel Miami in 2024, followed by pieces centered on Hong Kong and Dubai waters, which were subsequently exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong and Art Dubai in 2025. While appreciating these works, viewers often find familiar geographical coordinates and cultural imprints, imbuing the works with unique geopolitical sentiments while building bridges of emotional interaction between different regions and audiences.

This September, Vienna's BEK (Büro für experimentelle Kunst) will host Tan Mu's first solo exhibition of the Signal series, where paintings from the Signal series will join works from the Gaze series and other related pieces. Through multiple media including painting, video, and live musical performance, they will collectively construct a poetic resonance spanning technology, humanity, and the cosmos.