菲利浦·多德 (Philip Dodd)
Former Director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts
Tan Ping's sophisticated and sensuous art challenges the tired but powerful orthodoxy visible in certain kinds of art history and in many contemporary accounts of wider historical developments that we are destined to live a silo existence where 'our' cultures are only contaminated (rather than enriched) by those of others.
Tan Ping belongs in this 'not only but also' category of artists - mixing the grammars of Chinese and European art, making something compelling from the language of German expressionism and of the Chinese aesthetic and philosophical tradition of 'less is more'. Tan Ping is making art that is a salutary reminder that often the most arresting art - the kind that can respond to the intertwined complexity of our world - does indeed belong, but to various places and to a variety of traditions at the same time. Never has such art been needed more than at present.