Tang Shuo (b. 1987) is a Chinese artist who grew up in a small area of southern China. He studied experimental art at CAFA, Beijing, China, and mural painting at Guangxi Arts University, Guangxi, China. He has been living in London, UK, since 2020.

His work features a recurrent single or small group of dark-skinned Chinese persons, their tanned flesh suggesting a laborer or farmer who seems to be captured in or just after moments of labor, duty, or action. These figures are broad-faced and bodied (reminiscent of Diego Rivera’s paintings of Mexican peasants and fieldworkers), and the moments in which Tang chooses to portray his figures are telling. These are normal country people exalted into magnified poses. Tang’s technique is both realist and stylized, perhaps re-establishing and negating both the varied sets of values, new and old, which he finds himself questioning. Issues of politics, human rights, religion, and identity rest just beneath his refined surface, and memories of Tang’s childhood upbringing in the village of Boulder Hill inform everything he does. This inescapable sensibility is reminiscent of an Asian reinterpretation of Grant Wood’s enigmatic American Gothic and larger oeuvre, depicting a carefully contrived version of rural life combined with a strong sense of foreboding and loneliness.

TANG SHUO

SELECTED WORKS

Cornfield (3)

Cornfield (2)

Cornfield (1)