Uchercie Tang
“Their relationship with the environment has a subtle tension and a sense of alienation. Each creates a calm and absurd narrative. I want to save a little bit of contradictory atmosphere in the image, Rebellious and serene.”
Interview by: Stephen Feather
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I grew up in a small town without a gallery or theatre. My artistic enlightenment came mainly from the Internet. My growing experience is really nomadic, gradually migrating to a bigger city. However, my curiosity and demand for the metropolitan are not as strong as I expected. My eyes are like wearing a filter. I always draw artistic elements into reality. It is difficult to stop and escape into the abyss.
I am disassociated from my gender, nationality, and age. I describe myself as a person in a cage.
I am a pantheist, nihilist, anarchist, freewiller.
You work across mediums including photography, painting, poetry, design and installation. How do these art forms inform your practise?
My work is fuelled by images created in my unconscious, channeled through my imagination and through the threshold of my research on occultism and mythology. Existing within a geometrical utopia providing an antidote to the chaos of reality where poetry is suppressed.
This painting project is focused on Existentialism within contemporary urban society and the Paradoxes within philosophy. Fascinated by moments where language and images seem to fall apart like blurs or grey areas within the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity. By taking an approach that feels distant from my own reality in time and of being, I find a way to stare pen-optically at the ontological combination between contradiction and fantasy. This is the essence of my practice, it is my obsession and I explore it through a variety of mediums, I do not want to be constricted by substance, a sense of freedom is vital.
Enery flow, 2017
Blue flowers in the window sill, 2017
You recently won the Jacksons Art Prize for painting for your work, ‘Energy Flow’. How do you find that the public reception of your work influences you and the way you approach your future projects?
The comments of others are not the right way to help me become closer to the core of myself. Although sometimes I hope that the comments of others can create new dimensional worlds that I have not experienced yet. I hope that I could be able to enter those different worlds and steal some lovely pieces of fragments. My learning path is a labyrinth, all the forces of restriction and release from the outside will make me accurately find the exit of freedom.
If I can hear a voice, then it will definitely work on me, and I don't want to ignore any words. I am very resistant to being affected. So the influence between me and the public like I am taking a careful walk by the ocean, full of self-awareness, curious and looking forward to a crisis.
In several of your paintings you depict figures that are framed or set inside buildings. How significant is the relationship between the subject and the setting in your work?
The effect of the figure in my painting is tantamount to being in a cage. They have no emotional expression and no vitality. They are neither the fantoccini of the world nor the dominator, neither the subject nor the object. Those characters are like sad mollusks, with a vague expression of the desire to speak.
Their relationship with the environment has a subtle tension and a sense of alienation. Each creates a calm and absurd narrative. I want to save a little bit of contradictory atmosphere in the image, Rebellious and serene.
Coda, 2017
Where Word Breaks Off no thing may be, 2017
A gift for the next lover, 2016
Uchercie Tang in her studio
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
My Studio is in an Old Victorian house. I am used to spending time in the corner by the window. All the pigments are laid out in a gradual order on an antique tea trolley.
There is a hand-painted fish made by paper, about one meter long, with shiny plastic scales, an Indian veena, a keyboard, two antique chapel chairs, tarot cards, some ceramics; some out of print Poetry collections; some novels.
I find it difficult to concentrate, so I usually do two or more things in the studio at the same time, painting, editing photographs, or talking to friends. I am constantly talking to myself in the studio. I try to enter a state of meditation here with some minimalist or ambient music.
You’ve said that your “attraction to the diversity of civilization comes from the gap in the backwardness of industrial construction and the digitalization of modern life”. To what extent does your work look at the past and anticipate the future?
This is from a statement on a photography project. I went to a small, aging village where they retained a very traditional way of group entertainment. At the same time, smartphones and e-commerce and ultra-efficient logistics services run through their lives too. But they didn't dig more information through telecommunications and the Internet. I think they are people who voluntarily fall into the gap between the two eras. This gap is supported by a piece of net. My work is sometimes a visualization of this net, expressing its romance.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
Seamless, 1999 by Sarah Sze in Tate Modern, films by Bill Viola in RA, Alvin Lucier's orchestral show in Round Chapel.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
My next group show will be at Four Corner on 16-26 April. all welcome :)
All images courtesy of the artist
Publish date: 02/04/2019
