For a child growing up in Dashishan Village in southern China—amid an extended kinship tilling the soil and tending sheep—nature was simultaneously a sanctuary and an uncanny expanse, thick with serpents gliding through the scrub. Decades later in New York, faced with bare linen, Tang Shuo confronts the visceral fear of snakes that cast a shadow over his formative years. In Make Peace with Snakes, the artist stands grasping a sleek black serpent in his hands, its freshly shed skin coiled on the ground beneath him. This suspended moment, where dread yields to quiet reconciliation, serves as an apt distillation of his wider dialogue with the past.
On view at Plato Gallery, Borrowed History is the fruit of a profound inward return to Tang’s roots and native soil. In interrogating how lineage and cultural heritage sculpt human identity, the artist deliberately eschews the detached posture of documentary realism. Instead, working from his own photographic archive as a point of departure, he restages the lived experiences of his forebears through an allegorical cycle of self-portraits. Whether depicted as “The Migrant”—accompanied by a white dog, cane in hand and a modest bundle slung over his back—or “The Settler”, dragging a monolithic tree trunk amidst scattered tools, or as figures reposing in the shelter of a hollow tree, each subject bears Tang’s own features. Yet what they articulate is not an individual ego, but an avatar of collective memory.
The mythic register of these canvases shares an unmistakable affinity with the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Confectionery-pink clouds, impenetrable foliage, and the sovereign presence of the natural world draw disparate temporalities and generations onto a singular pictorial plane. For Tang, the sturdiest tether binding humankind to its ancestry is the very earth beneath its feet—trodden, shaped, and inhabited.
Fictionalized though these compositions may be, an elegiac lament for an imperiled world underpins the narrative. Dashishan, which teemed with over two hundred villagers during Tang’s youth, has today dwindled to a solitary handful. By transcribing the lore, the inhabitants, and the oral histories of this vanishing terrain, Tang continues to compile what functions as his own secular scripture.
Presenting the visual archive of a community steadily absorbed by time and modernisation, Borrowed History runs at Plato Gallery, New York, from 8 October to 7 November.
