“By intertwining mythological and personal narratives, I would like to present and juxtapose the timeless body (Venus) and the ephemeral body (myself). They are distinct yet inseparable from one another.”
— Yongqi Tang, 2024
Yongqi Tang’s most recent exhibition at Latitude Gallery boldly reimagines Venus, not as a distant, idealized figure, but as an exposed, vulnerable body. In our conversation, Tang explained her engagement with Venus as a site of rupture, scrutinizing and transforming the goddess from an image of perfection into a visceral, bleeding orifice. InThe Open Venus, Venus is not untouched by violence or pain; rather, she is depicted as a vessel in processes of leaking, breaking, and healing.
In Tang’s paintings, surfaces transition from smooth to rough, cracked to raw, embodying the duality of tenderness and violence inherent in the body’s experience. Through layers of thick, raw oil paint juxtaposed with gravelly textures, she stages a poetic intervention that solicits reflections on the body’s vulnerability and endurance. These textures also reflect Tang's deep engagement with historical painters, who employed unique devices to capture both the strength and vulnerability of the body: Botticelli’s love-filled renderings of flesh, Vittore Carpaccio’s knights conquering barren land, and William Blake’s ethereal, joyful fairies.
Tang’s own experience with scoliosis surgery further informs her newest paintings—a body of work marked by personal and physical invasion, anguish, and resilience. In her interpretation of Venus, she channels this catharsis and exposes the body’s frailty and strength in the process of recovery. Blood, a recurring motif in works like The Wound (2024) and Watercolor Study for Threading the Venus (2024), embodies the abject realities of bodily transformation. Whether lost through invasive surgery or during recurrent leakages experienced by the fertile, Tang does not depict blood as a direct symbol of pain but rather as a signifier of the strain required to survive. Yongqi Tang’s The Open Venus presents the body not as an object of desire, but as a raw reality, perpetually redefined by both internal and external forces.
