Guo-Liang Tan

Guo-Liang Tan (b. 1980, Singapore) is a visual artist working primarily in painting and text. In his work, the painterly and the textual act as surfaces for performing affect that can conjure a haunting or a promise. He is interested in how this sense of absence, located in the past and/or the future, frames our present-ness and of our subjectivities. Tension between the phenomenological and the psychological are played out in the process of painting and writing, staging congruencies and slippages that occurs within material and language. Tan's practice revolves around these moments of overlaps and gaps where projections and disruptions may be used to map out territories of desire.

Tan completed his BA Fine Art & Critical Studies at Goldsmiths College, London and his MFA at Glasgow School of Art. He was also a guest student at The Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His work has been exhibited and collected in Asia and Europe. A selection of his paintings was selected for the Singapore Platform at the inaugural Art Stage in 2011. In 2012, he presented his first solo exhibition 'Play Dead' at Space Cottonseed. He was subsequently awarded the National Arts Council Scholarship for visual art as well as the Mackendrick Scholarship and the Antje und Jürgen Conzelmann Preis for painting. Recent exhibitions include The Trouble With Painting Today in Pump House Gallery, London, and Peacetime Resistance in Bærum Kunsthall, Oslo and Glasgow Project Room.

Alongside his own work, he also collaborates with other artists on curatorial and publication projects, including 'Found & Lost' (2009) for Osage Gallery, 'We who saw signs' (2011) for Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (ICAS) and 'Singapore Intensive' (2012) for Future Perfect. His artist publication on drawing, 'Aversions' (2009) brought together contributions from a host of contemporary artists in Singapore to explore the conceptual and the performative in drawing. He was an artist-in-residence at the NTU CCA residency in 2015 and currently runs the project space Peninsular.