Guo-Liang Tan

Guo-Liang Tan’s paintings defy most understandings of the medium itself. Rather than using a brush for definitive or representational marks, he guides paint across fabric’s surface through various control systems, mediating the relationship between the materials as they assert their own gestures and character. The resulting works’ translucency integrates the stretcher bars beyond the role of supportive architecture, creating simultaneity of background and foreground, absence and presence. Guo-Liang has expressed his interest in phantasmal presence in painting and how his practice can ”be used to rethink the material body of painting as a site for evocation rather than expression.”