The Brooklyn Rail

The exhibition Tan Ping: The Unruly Verge of Flame brings together three topics: abstract painting, contemporaneity, and the innovations that classical Chinese aesthetics bring to global art. Tan Ping himself emphasizes that his work is shaped both by his five years of study in Germany and by his adherence to the classical aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting. He also implicitly introduces the topic of contemporaneity when he speaks of painting layers of color in historical sequences which can be frozen to “focus” on a void and empty space that is not in time.

The exhibition is a test with a question: does Tan Ping create abstract paintings of a contemporary sort that reconcile the freedom and individuality of abstract painting in Euro-American circles with the aesthetics of Daoism? Where each person’s spirit rises by looking at a plain empty space that shows their own nature as a living individual? This exhibition suggests that Tan Ping achieves such a reconciliation.

Art historian LaoZhu describes Tan Ping as initiating a third wave of abstract painting. First, there is Vasily Kandinsky who conveys feelings through symbols that are to function like a language. Second, Hans Hartung creates abstract paintings by direct expression of his feelings through bodily action, an approach carried further by Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. Third, Tan Ping creates novel abstract paintings that convey a primordial “non-being” more basic than the existence of things. Beate Reifenscheid adds that Tan Ping approaches his individuality through a pictorial space related both to inside and outside. Thus, when Tan Ping says that he freezes experiences of history to “focus” on empty space, he may mean that he stops experiences of space-time so that he can take notice of a primordial “non-being” or visible void that is manifest on the inside.

What techniques does Tan Ping use to create paintings about the history of mismatched experiences in relation to a stable, timeless “non-being” that shows a person’s own original nature of empty space? He uses a method of “cover” or “destructive overlay” where one layer of expressive lines and colors is covered over by the next. For example, in Fly (2025), there is an initial layer suggesting a light-filled background that comes closest to resembling the natural beauty of a landscape. This stage includes patches of red and black as well as lines of different weights and force. The second layer begins with the “destructive overlay” of a semi-transparent blue; the colors underneath become traces of past historical events. Over the blue are more lines that may imply fragile structures imposed by thought. Tan Ping is careful to prevent any one patch, color, thought or feeling from prevailing over the others: a black-line over a red mood is next to red mood over black-line. Tan Ping includes areas of indeterminate space out of which the lines of thought and dripping moods emerge. The “cover” in Fly is blue; but it is a patchwork of orange and red in an untitled 2024 work (number two in the show) and a long stretch of black in Out of Control (2025). Tan Ping’s paintings include layers in historical time and also voids; his paintings become archaeological records of the realm of his own feelings, thoughts, and image of visible space.

One marvel is that Tan Ping uses this same vocabulary of layering to create paintings, such as his untitled 2025 work and Out of Control, that map his emotions and thoughts onto his memory of the continents and nation-states of the real world. Consider Out of Control, where the “cover” of black suggests feelings of uncertainty and pain in relation to world events. In this abstract painting, personal feelings are products of geopolitical events. But now, observation of existing geopolitical events is not separate from Tan Ping’s realm as an individual person that contains feelings, thoughts, and the place of his own naturalness within which things come into being. So, his art of 2025 provides an answer to one-dimensional thinking that is limited to real things.  

Tan Ping succeeds then in creating art about historical forces and feelings while maintaining a unique place of naturalness for each individual. This success can be described in two ways: either in Daoist terms as paintings about a personal realm that includes mind (feelings and thoughts) and an image of void or emptiness which manifests one’s own naturalness outside descriptions of “being.” Or it can be expressed in terms of stopping historical narratives so the one can return to a timeless, natural origin in a present of one’s own that serves as a way of personal entry into the dimension of real events. Curator Cui Cancan suggests this joining of the real and the personal when he writes that Tan Ping’s paintings achieve “a fractured terrain and a spiritual imagery of equal intensity.”

This breaking through the narratives of history to return to one’s own origin of naturalness is also the subject matter of the video Between Mountains and Waters X “- I.” Tan Ping performs as a painter together with Hou Ying and a group of dancers. Dancers dressed in black stand half-hidden behind a long scroll of empty paper. Picking up brush and ink, Tan Ping takes some minutes to make a shanshui [mountain-water] painting that consists of a single horizontal line. After a pause, each dancer slowly moves and pulls away from the wall to create breaks in the paper scroll that carries the history of the line made in ink. In effect, each dancer moves in a way that fragments the scroll of history and that reveals an actual empty space in which pieces of history come and go. Together, the dancers gather up, compress, and finally deposit the pieces of paper in a pile near onlookers.

Therefore, the conclusion from Tan Ping’s exhibition: innovative work of global value that clarifies the notion of contemporaneity is now being conducted in China by artists who are guided both by modern traditions of abstract art and by classical Daoist aesthetics of calligraphy and landscape painting.