"Bone-Deep Understanding: Tang Qishan Contemporary Art Exhibition" Opens September 4th!

Curator: Zhang Lanqian
Chief Planner: Zuo Fengyi
Academic Chairs: Wang Ziyan, Shi Chunli
Artist: Tang Qishan

Coordinators: Xu Gengliang, Ni Heqin
Curatorial Team: Wei Jiafan, He Keming, Chen Shuori, Zhao Meishan, Wang Yubo, Xu Jiaxing

Organizer: Shenzhen Art Industry Promotion Association
Presenter: Nanshan Mangu · Tonggou Art Space
Co-organizers: Shenzhen Cangjietong Culture Communication Co., Ltd., MGU Original Designer Headquarters Base.
Supporting Unit: Shenzhen Prenta Culture Co., Ltd.

Exhibition Dates: September 4 – September 30, 2025, 10:30 – 17:00
(Closed on Mondays; appointments required for weekends. Booking phone: 132-6562-3041, Mr. Wei)
Opening Ceremony: September 4, 2025, 3:00 PM
Venue: Tonggou Art Space, 1F, Buildings 1-2, Nanshan Mangu, 5 Yuehai Road, Nanshan District, Shenzhen

Artist Profile

Tang Qishan is a contemporary Chinese painter and calligrapher. He holds a Master’s degree in Cultural and Arts Management from Switzerland Business School and was a visiting scholar at the China National Academy of Painting. He serves as a director of the Shenzhen Art Industry Promotion Association, art advisor of Shenzhen Purentang Culture Co., Ltd., a deeply collaborating artist of Guangzhou Art Fair, and a recommended artist of PRENTA. His works have been collected by institutions such as the Tibet Armed Police Force, Guangdong Art Museum, Gansu Bamboo Slips Museum, Russia-China Chamber of Commerce, and Moscow Omega-L.

Tang’s artistic practice is groundbreaking. He skillfully integrates modern composition with Eastern aesthetics, forming a unique artistic symbolism. His notable series include: Forest Memory, Water Lilies, White Cranes, Oracle Bone Script · Symbols, Inheritance · Symbols, Origin · Life, and Grace · Spirit. These works serve as gateways into his distinctive artistic landscape.

Tang’s profound artistic mastery is enriched by his extensive travels and studies across Russia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Vietnam, and other countries. Drawing inspiration from traditional painting and sculpture while engaging with contemporary art practices, cross-regional and cross-cultural exchanges have broadened his perspective, enabling him to incorporate diverse cultural elements into his work.

Foreword

Time flows, and civilization reconstructs itself between rupture and continuity. Chinese characters, as the oldest symbolic system in the East, carry the profound cultural memory and genes of the Chinese nation. In Tang Qishan’s works, oracle bone script—the primordial form of Chinese characters—breaks free from the constraints of historical documents and reawakens through the language of contemporary art.

Tang’s creative process is a dialogue spanning three millennia. Using oracle bone strokes as primal elements, he deconstructs, refines, and reassembles them into modern visual symbols. Through the interplay of acrylic and canvas, he constructs a new aesthetic expression. These symbols retain the mystery and rustic simplicity of antiquity while incorporating contemporary dynamism and tension. They are no longer merely cold archaeological materials but vessels of emotion and spiritual totems, reflecting the artist’s deep contemplation of “form and meaning,” “ancient and modern.”

“Bone-Deep Understanding” (入骨相知) conveys a resonance beyond time and space—how cultural pulses, engraved in bone and infused in blood, can be perceived, understood, and inherited anew through art. Tang’s works are not simple reproductions of ancient charm but a return to origins through a contemporary lens, seeking balance between abstraction and figuration, and building connections between symbol and emotion. The brushstrokes are as sharp as carving knives, the colors as solemn as rituals, as if guiding the viewer into a meditative dialogue with ancient ancestors.

This exhibition at Tonggou Art Space presents both Tang Qishan’s years of contemporary transformation of oracle bone script’s aesthetic system and his visual practice of the Eastern philosophical principles of “harmony between humanity and nature” and “fusion of object and self”—it is itself a “isomorphic” integration of form and meaning, object and self. In Shenzhen, a city driven by innovation, these works will dialogue with tradition and resonate with the future, inviting viewers to reexamine the roots of culture.

This exhibition is dedicated to the never-ending exploration of civilization.

Curator: Zhang Lanqian

August 20, 2025

Partial Exhibited Works

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