Strange Tales: Yongqi Tang

“We find the beginning of the plastic arts intersecting the origins of drawing and painting. All spring from the shadows of life.”

The Natural History- Pliny the Elder

Make Room is proud to present Strange Tales, a collection of allegorical drawings and paintings that bring modernity to the traditional style. Yongqi Tang digs through ancient myths to reveal the archetypical aspects of human fears and desires as they apply to her story as well as life in our times. The mirrored past of allegory in Western and Eastern narratives of myth shows the similarities across human culture that capture her experiences as an artist, as a foreigner, and as a young woman.

The main source of inspiration comes from the collection of stories, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, fables about spirits and happenings that inform morality and romanticism. They hold a darkness, stories of demons and spirits, akin to a Chinese Brothers Grimm. Hundreds of pages long and full of different tales, Yongqi selects a few stories that connect to art, and her life and expands on these stories to build tales from her own studio.

A three-panel standing screen that Yongqi constructed demonstrates the similarities between eastern and western storytelling despite the cultural divide. One side holds a scene from “The Painted Skin,” a Strange Tale of a demon using painted skin to hide as a young maiden, while the other depicts the story of Butades, where a young woman uses paint and clay to capture the shadow of her lover. Both stories demonstrate a romantic aspect of creation and the illusion of beauty in art. Yongqi creates her own mythos in these paintings as well. Several paintings come together to create the story of a girl grown from a pot being released to the earth as it shatters and falls. A modern scene in a club imagines a world of lights and lust that hides a feeling of confusion and loneliness. 

As an artist, she straddles the Pacific Ocean, holding onto a connection to Chinese folklore as she comes to a culture steeped in its own myth and tradition. Capturing these stories through art is a long-held tradition that spans across humanity, giving life and body to characters and events that exist in fiction.