About

Tan Mu Research is the research and creative projects arm of Tan Mu Studio.

Tan Mu (b. 1991, Shandong, China; lives and works in Paris) is a contemporary artist whose research-driven practice investigates the hidden infrastructures that shape contemporary life. Working primarily through oil painting, she translates subjects that operate beyond ordinary visibility into sustained visual inquiry: submarine fiber-optic cable networks that carry 99 percent of the world’s intercontinental data, quantum computers that function at temperatures approaching absolute zero, glacial formations that archive hundreds of thousands of years of atmospheric history, and lunar surfaces rendered visible only through machine vision and spectral data.

Her practice integrates traditional painting with expanded research methods including scientific visualization, satellite imagery, microscopy, and embodied fieldwork. As a competitive freediver, Tan Mu brings a somatic understanding of the submarine environment to her work on undersea infrastructure, treating the body itself as a perceptual instrument.

She holds a BFA from Alfred University, New York, and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at BEK Forum, Vienna (2025) and Peres Projects, Berlin and Milan (2022), and group exhibitions at the ERES Foundation, Munich; Arario Gallery, Shanghai; and YveYANG, New York. Her work is held in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Spain; the A.R.M. Holding Art Collection, United Arab Emirates; and other major private and institutional collections.