Tan Mu – Dawn: Review by Li Yizhuo

In Tan Mu’s latest exhibition at Peres Projects, Berlin, there is yet no sight of symbolism, of a slouching, beastly modernism as such. One indeed finds the media spectacle of a disaster in The Gulf of Mexico; Tan Mu painted the nightmarish scene caused by gas leak from an underwater pipeline in July 2021, based on a widely circulated video taken on a helicopter on the same day of the accident. The fire spread rapidly in a vortex and would not die down for hours despite massive effort. One may call it disconcerting, alarming, but in the form of an orange blaze on the ocean surface also revealing of the spiralling environmental impact of human activities. As the investigation into the spill and cause of fire linger on, Yeats’ lines of a world falling apart sound louder.