Tan Ping: What Is Painting 1984-2021

Tang Contemporary Art is proud to announce the opening of a major retrospective for Tan Ping, entitled “Tan Ping: What Is Painting 1984-2021”, held in both of the gallery’s Beijing spaces at 4 p.m. on May 15.

Curated by Cui Cancan, the exhibition will showcase more than one hundred drawings, oil paintings, prints, and videos, offering a complete overview of Tan Ping’s creative career since 1984, as well as his most recent work from 2021.

As one of the leading figures in Chinese abstract art since the 1980s, Tan Ping has provided us with a rich and complex body of examples of how to reshape the grammar, structure, and experimental methods of a medium; in the process, his work has become an important reference in the Chinese contemporary painting scene.

In a painting career spanning nearly 40 years, Tan Ping has witnessed many waves of artistic ideas. In the early 1980s, he engaged with traditional academic realism and naturalism, but after 1984, he moved on to a formal interest in still lifes, landscapes, and figure paintings and the study of Surrealism and Expressionism. In the early 1990s, experiments with blocks of color, line, black and white, spatial sequences, and other materials appeared in a series of prints and oil paintings that began Tan’s visual exploration of abstract art. After 2000, his formal experiments shifted towards a broader range of painted actions, including calligraphy, scrawl, repetition, and layering.