Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, September 27, 2024: Tang Shuo, a Chinese emerging artist, painter (#2122)

Tang Shuo is a painter of modern life but a peculiar form of modern life beset by the irreconcilable distances between the past and the present. Tang’s paintings both vividly remember the social conflagrations of China’s Cultural Revolution, when radical social reformers waged war on rentier landowners, and yet manage to seem entirely of our own moment. In their tender studies of young lovers, recluses and co-conspirators, there is an undeniably modern sensibility that can be traced back to the wide-eyed passion for colour among Impressionists on voyages abroad over a century ago. Mostly dramatised self-portraits lost in imagined landscapes of lush vegetation and wildflowers, Tang’s world is a paradise of plenty haunted by the vengeful ghosts of the past who return, sometimes violently, sometimes silently, like a nightmare in the minds of the living.

The first member of his family to go to university and now living in the seething metropole of west London, Tang has reimagined the world of his childhood in emotionally complex and hyper-sensitive compositions. Ostensibly, these pictures tell a personal, human story of how social classes fight to survive. They are inspired by the hard experiences of a friend’s father and grandfather, prosperous landowners during the most violent years of the People’s Republic of China. Bearing the guilt of the wealthy, they were dispossessed and exiled.

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