Guo-Liang Tan

Guo-Liang Tan is a visual artist whose practice centers on painting, installation, and text. Through his work, he explores the relationship between materiality, perception, and the experience of space and time. He is particularly interested in how absence—whether rooted in the past or projected into the future—shapes our sense of presence and subjectivity.

Since 2015, Tan has developed a distinctive approach to painting using thin, translucent aeronautical fabric as a ground. Onto its water-resistant surface, he applies diluted acrylic paint, allowing pigment to pool, stain, and slowly permeate the material. This indirect method rejects conventional brushwork in favor of a process that embraces fluidity, gravity, and duration as compositional forces. Often, the wooden stretcher frame remains visible beneath the sheer fabric, creating a subtle interplay between structure and color, light and shadow, image and object.

Tan’s paintings frequently hover between surface and screen, image and sculpture. The translucent quality of the material invites viewers to look through and beyond, suggesting a space in flux. In his “painterly screen” series, he extends this inquiry into three dimensions by mounting painted fabric on freestanding wooden structures. These installations activate the surrounding space, inviting the viewer’s body, movement, and shadow to become part of the visual experience. As ambient light shifts, the works themselves subtly transform, emphasizing the performative, time-based nature of painting.

His recent Blueshift series deepens this temporal dimension, drawing on everyday gestures such as folding laundry, origami, or ritual actions to inscribe memory into the fabric. Once folded, stretched, and painted, the surface retains faint traces of manipulation. Pigment settles into creases and folds, forming images that seem to emerge from the process itself. These works speak to a slower, more contemplative sense of time—an experience that painting uniquely offers.

At the intersection of the painterly and the textual, Tan’s practice reflects a sustained engagement with absence, presence, and desire. By staging moments of congruence and slippage between material and language, image and object, his work opens up territories where affect can be performed, felt, and reimagined.

Biography
Born in 1980, Singapore.
Lives and works in Singapore.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
Another Folding Scene, Sifang Art Museum Tong Ren Rd Space, Shanghai, China (2024)
in mid shapes, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2023)
Soft Turnings, Ota Fine Arts, Singapore (2021)
Ghost Screen, Ota Fine Arts, Singapore (2017)
Play Dead, Space Cottonseed, Singapore (2012)

Selected Group Exhibitions
The Secrets of Color from Impressionism to Contemporary Art, Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, Japan (2024)
Everyday Practices, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2024)
Re-surfacing, STORAGE, Bangkok, Thailand (2023)
Object of Desire, Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum, Iceland (2021)
A Different Way of (Thinking About) Painting?, Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017)
The Trouble With Painting Today, Pump House Gallery, London, UK (2014)　

Selected Installation Projects
A Folding Scene, Esplanade Concourse, Singapore (2023)
Arrive, Arrive, National Gallery Singapore (2021)

Collections
Singapore Art Museum, Singapore
Tanoto Foundation, Singapore
Christian Dior Couture, Singapore/ France
Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore, Singapore