Among all the shows opening in Tribeca and Chinatown in October, The Open Venus at Lattitude Gallery stood out. There is no shortage of painting exhibitions right now, so an artist’s work must be exceptional to stand out. Yongqi Tang uses a Renaissance-inspired style and Catholic and Greek symbology to express the brutality of becoming beautiful.
Tang uses Renaissance art as satire, perverting tableaus of knights and ladies with gore and excrement. Tang’s paintings point out a hidden truth: beauty is pain. In the case of Tang’s paintings, pain is also beautiful. She depicts figures displaying their wounds on canvases dripping with blood. These pieces are reminiscent of Christ showing off his Stigmata. Tang’s piece, The Wound, is primarily referential to Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. In The Wound, the figure’s hand is in their wound, putting the character in both the role of Christ and Saint Thomas.
