“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. ”
Artist Tan Ping will have his major exhibition “Back and Forth: The Art of Tan Ping” at the Rothko Museum in Latvia from May 31st to August 25th, 2024. This exhibition honors Tan Ping's hybrid identity as an artist; not only was he educated in Beijing and Berlin, but his work fuses European and Asian elements – including the work of Mark Rothko.
The curator of this exhibition, Philip Dodd, is the former Director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, an award-winning broadcaster, and Chair of the award-winning Made in China (UK) Ltd.
He has curated exhibitions in London, Beijing, Moscow, Singapore, and New York, with artists as various as Yoko Ono, Sean Scully, Hsiao Chin, Kang Haitao, and Damien Hirst. He was one of the curators of the 7th Guangzhou Triennial and was one of the curators of the 2023 Chengdu Biennale. At present, he is the curator of one of the opening exhibitions at the new Guangdong Museum of Art which opened on 1st May, 2024.
For Philip Dodd Daugavpils is the perfect location to encounter Tan Ping's art - after all, the city is a border city that has paradoxically changed its allegiances but forged its own identity and was the first home of Mark Rothko, a major artist who might be described in the same terms.
Philip Dodd, in his foreword to the exhibition catalog, states:
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.
Some of the major art of the modern period rebuts that belief: for a long time, Picasso had opened his studio as inspiration and challenged a book on the great modern Chinese artist Qi Baishi, which showed how the artist conjured up a fish in a few ink strokes; and however unfathomable it might appear, we need to understand the European and Jewish roots of Mark Rothko, an artist that the US art world exclusively claimed as its own, to fully understand his art.
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.
