Tan Mu (b. 1991, Shandong, China; lives and works in the United States) is a contemporary artist whose long-form, research-driven practice explores the hidden architectures shaping contemporary life. Working across painting and expanded visual systems, her work engages with technological infrastructures, data systems, cosmic perspectives, and collective memory, constructing a visual language that moves between macro and micro scales. Her work approaches these subjects as interconnected structures, where system and sensation, abstraction and lived experience, remain deeply entangled within the human condition.

Combining traditional oil painting with tools of expanded vision, including microscopes, satellite imagery, and scientific visualization, Tan Mu navigates the liminal space between technological history and personal experience. She views technology as both an extension of the body and an externalization of memory, creating compositions that interweave embryos, neurons, logic circuits, quantum computers, solar farms, data nodes, and celestial bodies. Through this layered imagery, she builds visual bridges between the visible and the invisible, the tactile and the abstract, the systemic and the affective.

Tan Mu’s ongoing Signal series is a sustained artistic investigation into the invisible architectures of global communication. Grounded in infrastructure, media geography, technological poetics, and human perception, the series transforms submarine fiber-optic networks into symbolic “digital constellations” that bridge abstraction and representation, emotion and system. Mu reimagines these hidden infrastructures not merely as technical constructs, but as vessels of collective memory and human connection. By fusing planetary systems with individual and cultural histories, Signal creates poetic diagrams of connection and rupture, mapping time, scale, and collective presence. Works from the Signal series have been acquired by major international collections, positioning the project within a global cultural dialogue.

Tan Mu holds a BFA in Expanded Media from Alfred University, New York (2015), and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 2011. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Peres Projects in Berlin and Milan (2022) and BEK Forum in Vienna (2025). She is currently featured in the group exhibition Seeing the Unseen at the ERES Foundation in Munich. She has previously participated in group exhibitions at Arario Gallery, Shanghai (2025), Penske Projects, New York (2024), and YveYANG, New York (2023). Her work has been widely featured and critically reviewed in international publications such as Artnet News, Mousse Magazine, and Numero Berlin, engaging themes of technology, memory, and visual abstraction. Her paintings are held in major private and institutional collections, including the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (Spain), A.R.M. Holding Art Collection (United Arab Emirates), The Institute for Electronic Arts (United States), the Central Academy of Fine Arts Collection (Beijing), and the Alfred School of Art and Design Collection (New York).

Selected Collections 

A.R.M. Holding Art Collection, United Arab Emirates
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Spain
The Institute for Electronic Arts, United States
Central Academy of Fine Arts Collection, Beijing
Alfred School of Art and Design Collection, New York

Full portfolio upon request at tan@tanmustudio.com

For any inquiries about the artist’s work, including exhibitions, institutional collaborations, media, or project proposals, please get in touch with Nick Koenigsknecht at nick@openforum.info

Tan Mu Studio is a research-driven studio supporting the development and realization of Tan Mu’s artistic practice. Working across painting, installation, sound, and expanded visual systems, the studio collaborates with scholars, designers, musicians, filmmakers, architects, physicists, and researchers affiliated with scientific and biotech research institutes. Operating as both a production site and a research platform, the studio integrates experimentation, archiving, publishing, and collaboration into a practice that connects artistic production with scientific inquiry and public engagement.