Platform China Contemporary Art Institute will present Tang Dayao’s solo exhibition ‘Days’ in Space A on September 7. The exhibition will showcase works from the past three years, revealing the internal mechanisms of his creative process.
In Tang Dayao’s recent paintings, he narrates the past surroundings and his daily life. Reality compels him to trudge through time, confronting the dust of life. He neither reconciles with conflict nor resists it fiercely. When light occasionally passes through the dust, the swirling particles resemble the clutter of life, which he captures as silent narratives in his paintings.
He chooses moments from everyday life where accidents and conflicts unfold, offering experiences that resonate with empathy. In the work ‘Daddy’ , he meticulously organizes the narrative choices in the painting. The sudden intrusion of his son during a private bathing moment simultaneously evokes embarrassment, acceptance, and warmth. This small awkwardness overlaps with fragments he had read in books but overlooked, becoming a tacit understanding shared between him and life. The role of father also reshapes his inherent relationships with the world around him. The world he sees is no longer familiar and tempting but tinged with anxiety and empathy born out of love. Ordinary days become more tense and precious, harboring undercurrents of emotion.
‘I still want to return to specific things and the everyday to construct narratives.’ Tang Dayao doesn’t choose to piece together fragmented moments into something supposedly profound; instead, he moves toward truth in his work with personal involvement. Perhaps the reason for reopening these long-sealed memories stems from his son. Just as in ‘Young Man No.2’ , where a boy being chased by a dog points to a complex emotion for Tang Dayao—this is a nostalgic longing for the past. A once-distant childhood scene resurfaces, seemingly trying to pull ‘me’ back to where I started, while ‘I’ am striding forward. The forms and relationships in these paintings do not directly reflect real scenes but originate from a universal imagery, as if compensating for reality.
This personal emotion also resonates with the collective. Therefore, it is evident that Tang Dayao’s paintings mirror the everyday life we are familiar with. Under the vast and solid pressure of reality, the individual is so fragile yet resilient. The artist extracts insignificant moments from the mundane; the characters on the canvas want to escape but cannot break free, trapped in a confined space. In ‘Guest on a Rainy Night’ , a boy gazes at a sudden stranger who hides his identity under an olive-green raincoat, seemingly enveloped by pervasive pressure. The exposed, strange feet suggest to everyone that this might be an uninvited guest. We witness awkwardness, fear, and the unknown—these subtle emotions are like raindrops. However, Tang Dayao does not turn away from this discomfort; instead, he chooses to encapsulate sharp reality within smooth, playful forms, even turning it into a kind of humor—he wraps up these dangers and thorns but also allows them to confront reality head-on.
In Tang Dayao’s recent works, balconies frequently appear, reflecting the widespread period of staying at home. They serve as spaces where narratives unfold and where lines and forms are placed. The balcony connects the inside with the outside, linking the life of the present with the world of the past. It resembles that part of our private psychological space that reaches out to explore the external world, while also acting as a passageway for retreating from public issues into the individual self. The artist uses large areas of color blocks to create gaps between the painting and reality, allowing the colors to naturally take root through intuition. In ‘Balcony No.3’ , a boy is fiddling with scattered toys on a table in the dark, a scene that should be filled with warmth and ease, yet outside the window, someone is falling. Tang Dayao depicts the boy’s body as almost resembling a monkey—though dressed in vibrant colors, he exudes gloom and hopelessness. In ‘Balcony No.2’ , a strangely melancholic cow cat becomes the ‘blindspot’ , triggering the unfolding of the entire narrative and drawing the gaze of all the characters in the scene. The staggered, floating balconies depict a rescue plea from below to above, while the unfamiliar face and posture of the man shift the narrative structure in another direction—we cannot confidently predict his actions. Urgency and lethargy, expectation and indifference—these conflicts converge here, and what we collectively face is the towering buildings that endlessly replicate themselves, blocking our way.
Whether sharp and intense or plain and mild, Tang Dayao is likely the latter. The intense approach has its way of sweeping through, recklessly destroying reality, allowing tragedy and sorrow to repeatedly play out in real life. He avoids using sharpness and pain as channels for venting or tools for attack. Instead, he consciously chooses those who are overlooked and forgotten, those that are closely connected to his life and repeatedly manifest in the days we’ve all shared. Thus, we can see Tang Dayao’s paintings overflow in a rather gentle manner. He neither exploits emotional inertia to make a point nor allows the main subjects to reveal themselves too overtly. Instead, he selectively conceals them within the paintings. Reality is allowed to occur here, but no final answers are provided, leaving only the constant days to confront the recurring passage of time.
Text: Yu Chang
