Tang Yongxiang:”People / Tree / Feet”

TANK Shanghai is honored to announce the solo exhibition “People / Tree / Feet” by Tang Yongxiang. The exhibition will open on November 11, 2025, and remain on view through February 8, 2026.

As a painter, Tang Yongxiang adheres to the process of “overpainting” his own works: each day, he enters his studio and, through a set of prescribed repertoire of brushwork gestures and coloring decisions, returns to canvases that were “paused” in their making from the previous workday. This cycle repeats daily, accumulating across years, with the painter’s set of seemingly calculable and near-uncompromising operational  actions: the extraction of images from “nearby” his life, the direct use of raw pigments, the application of uniform cross-hatched brushstrokes, and so on. Eventually a painting is “over,” permanently “paused,” and released from his studio into the broader moments of display, viewing, and critique.

This pause, whether manifesting as daily routine or a quasi-permanent indication of a painting’s completion, seems to exist in a state of self-perpetuated release, intrinsic to painting itself and autonomous from the painter’s control. A dozen or so paintings remain suspended here at Tank. They continue to silently vary and allure viewers and critics during the course of this two-month exhibition, unfolding an ambient effect moment of Tang Yongxiang’s paintings.

A “formatted overpainting” before the painting-operator left is a rhetoric derive from the language of computer operation, referring to the in-game action of a video game player. Once the operator steps away, however, the video game machine continues to execute and perform its own narrative movements, unfolding a moment of ambient motion intrinsic to the computer itself.

Computer acts as an intermediary for the current society of control because it does not re/presents or simulates the world, but directly calculates and executes one. Unlike movies and paintings which are representations of society through images, computer is about action and execution—a form of practice rather than an ontological presence. In this sense, to articulate Tang Yongxiang’s painting and operations through the multiple operational acts between the computer game player and the machine—within and beyond the game’s narrative—is itself an allegorical gesture that speaks to the calculative and executive logic of today’s society of control.

Viewing from the broader, systematic perspective of the art-operator and the institutional “machine,” the relationship of painting and its corresponding actions is that of control and counter-control, the computable and the uncomputable, execution and counter-gaming with the painting-operator. That is, the “painting-operator” and the “painting-machine” constituted an allegorical narrative within and beyond painting-diegetic. When Tang Yongxiang pressed “pause” upon entering Beijing’s contemporary Chinese painting scene in 2007, suspending his own specific game of realist painting for several years, it represents the operator’s act-moment of the player’s subjectively initiated algorithm, one that manifests the act-moment of artistic hacking and critique.

The critical narrative of Tang Yongxiang’s paintings is an ambivalent expression of something “meaningless,” “inactive,” and “resists to give in to total nihilism.” It insinuates a reality that can now be described as the affective tribulation of being an ordinary constituent of the society of control. Can we still reimagine and bring forth a collective utopia in the age of control? Does Tang Yongxiang’s painting operate as “painting as ontology”—re/presenting or simulating a world, or as “painting as ethics,” an act parallel to the operative logic of the contemporary society of control?

How might the painting-operator take actions standing beside the painting—this “painting as allegorical machine” in the society of control—just as any actant within the actant-network society stands beside the allegorical machine of their own social assembly-line station? Similar to Tang Yongxiang’s act of “pausing,” each of us may need to perform an operation of forsaking our ready-to-hand acts. This pausing is not a once-and-for-all solution, but must be revisited perpetually.

1.The exhibition title People / Tree / Feet is inspired by the artist’s painting A Tree, a Group of People, and Some Feet (2024). This artwork title originated from a formal description made by institution staff according to their first impression of the painting after its completion.

2.This text is excerpted and edited from the curator’s essay Of Painting: the Moment of Ambience Act—One Among All Allegories of Painting in the Society of Control (2025).