Biological Structures
Cells, embryos, genetics, cloning, and the material structures that constitute living systems.
The Posture That Held the Distance: Tan Mu's Yoga Isolation and the Body Between Together and Apart
On June 21, 2020, the summer solstice, residents of Toronto gathered for an outdoor yoga session in a public park.
The Gap That Remains: Tan Mu's Dolly and the Blur Where Memory Meets the Copy
Dolly the sheep was born on July 5, 1996, at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh. She was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, a Finn Dorset ewe's mammary gland cell inserted into an enucleated egg and brought to term by a surrogate mother.
The Vial That Contained the Year: Tan Mu's Vaccine and the Object That Held Everything
The glass is roughly six centimeters tall. It tapers from a rounded base to a narrow neck, and the neck is sealed with a rubber stopper and an aluminum crimp cap.
The Negative Where the Hand Was: Tan Mu's Touch and the Trace That Outlasts Contact
Move close enough and the hand dissolves.
The Corridor That Closed: Tan Mu's Isolation and the White Cube That Became a Ward
In March 2020, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the west side of Manhattan stopped hosting exhibitions and started admitting patients.
The Clone and the Canvas: Tan Mu's Epithelial Cells and the Color of Lineage
At thirty centimeters from the surface, the painting is a geology of pigment. Clusters of saturated color, emerald and ruby and sapphire and topaz, sit raised against a dark...
The Glow That Came From Within: Tan Mu’s Illuminate and the Filament That Made Time
New Year's Eve, 1879. Menlo Park, New Jersey. Three thousand people stood in the cold outside Thomas Edison's laboratory, watching the windows. Inside, the laboratory was lit by...
The Posture That Held: Tan Mu’s Yoga Isolation and the Body in Ranged Separation
At a distance of six inches, the surface of Yoga Isolation is a field of thin, horizontal striations. The paint has been applied in narrow bands that travel across the linen from...
The Circle That Holds Everything: Tan Mu's Embryo and the Density of the Beginning
A human embryo at the blastocyst stage, approximately five days after fertilization, consists of roughly one hundred cells. Those one hundred cells contain the complete genetic...
The Wall That Breathes: Tan Mu's Epithelial Cells and the Boundary That Makes the Body a System
Julien Offray de La Mettrie published Man a Machine in 1748, and the scandal of the proposition has never fully subsided. La Mettrie argued that the human body is not a vessel for...
The Figure Before the Frame: Tan Mu's Turf and the Memory That Arrived From Outside
There is a photograph of a young man seated on a soccer field. He wears the kit of a professional athlete in 1980s China: the shorts, the socks pulled high, the stance of someone...
The Heat That Stays: Tan Mu's Touch and the Body the Screen Could Not Hold
Tan Mu, Touch, 2022. Oil on linen, 76 x 76 cm (30 x 30 in). A thermal camera does not see surfaces. It sees the radiation that surfaces emit. A...
The Distance Between Bodies: Tan Mu's Yoga Isolation and the Geometry of Being Together Apart
Li Yizhuo, writing in the BEK Forum catalog about Tan Mu's monochrome works, observes that the absence of color "intensifies emotional distance and stillness" and creates "an...
The Vial That Held the Year: Tan Mu's Vaccine and the Object That Became a Promise
The photograph appeared in the first week of December 2020. A small glass vial, roughly six centimeters tall, with a purple cap and a label bearing a brand name. It had been...
The Heat That Remains: Tan Mu's Touch and the Hand That Left Its Mark
In the Río Pinturas canyon in Argentine Patagonia, the rock overhangs known as the Cueva de las Manos preserve hundreds of human handprints stenciled in mineral pigment across the...
The Largest Cell and the Smallest Choice: Tan Mu's IVF and the Asymmetry of Design
A human egg is roughly one hundred micrometers in diameter. It is the largest single cell in the human body. You can see it without magnification if you know where to look, a pale...
The Circle That Changed Everything: Tan Mu's The Pill and the Object That Redesigned Autonomy
Enovid was the brand name. G. D. Searle and Company was the manufacturer. The Food and Drug Administration approved it on May 9, 1960, and by 1965, five million American women...
The Heat That Stayed: Tan Mu’s Touch and the Handprint Across Millennia
The human hand at rest radiates heat at roughly 33 degrees Celsius. An infrared camera pointed at a hand held against a dark surface records that heat as a gradient of color, the...
The Hand That Reached Across Ten Thousand Years: Tan Mu's Touch and the Mark That Outlasts the Body
In the canyon of the Río Pinturas, in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, Argentina, there is a cave whose walls are covered with hundreds of handprints.
The Filament That Divided: Tan Mu's Illuminate and the Light That Made Itself Alive
On New Year's Eve, 1879, Thomas Edison invited three thousand people to his laboratory complex in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to witness the public demonstration of an invention he had been refining for over a year.
The Form That Holds Everything: Tan Mu's First Week and the Quiet Order at the Beginning
Within twelve hours of fertilization, the single cell that results from the merger of sperm and egg has not yet divided.
The Needle and the Egg: Tan Mu’s IVF and the Scale of What We Can Now Choose
The human egg is the largest single cell in the body.
The Filament That Remembered the Cell: Tan Mu's Illuminate and the Origin That Light and Life Share
On New Year's Eve in 1879, three thousand people traveled to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to see a light.
The Gems That Are Alive: Tan Mu's Epithelial Cells and the Boundary Where Biology Becomes Color
A cell is not a gemstone.
The Stretch Between Isolation and Community: Tan Mu's Yoga Isolation and the Ritual of Distance
The photograph was taken in June 2020, outdoors, in Toronto. It shows figures in yoga poses on a stretch of grass or open ground, their bodies extended in the familiar geometries of sun salutations and warrior stances, their mats separated by intervals of bare earth.
What Remains After the Hand Is Gone: Tan Mu's Touch and the Archaeology of Warmth
Sometime between 9,000 and 13,000 years ago, a group of people gathered at the entrance of a canyon in what is now Santa Cruz, Argentina.
The Object That Looks Back: Tan Mu's The Pill and the Weight of the Gaze
A circular plastic case, roughly the diameter of a silver dollar, containing twenty-eight tablets arranged around its perimeter like the hours on a clock face. The design was deliberate. The first birth control pill dispensers, introduced by G.D.
The Distance Between Bodies: Tan Mu's Yoga Isolation and the Paradox of Communal Solitude
June 21, 2020, the summer solstice, the longest day of a year that already felt endless. In a park in Toronto, a group of people gathered to practice yoga.
The White Cube Inverted: Tan Mu's Isolation and the Exhibition Space Turned Ward
Eight hundred and forty thousand square feet. That is the floor area of the Jacob K.
The Catalog of Life: Tan Mu's IVF and the Architecture of Selection
The sperm bank catalog arrives in the mail like a department store's seasonal guide, pages of faces organized by height, eye color, undergraduate institution, SAT scores, musical talent, and family medical history. The language is precise. The photographs are tasteful.
The First Division: Tan Mu's Embryo and the Moment Before Individuality
In the autumn of 1978, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe announced the first successful in vitro fertilization resulting in a live birth: Louise Brown, born on July 25 of that year in Oldham, England.
The Original Blur: Tan Mu's Dolly and the Clone That Gazed Back
Li Yizhuo, writing in early 2022 about Tan Mu's recent paintings, opened with a sentence that has since become one of the most quoted observations about this body of work: "among her intricately executed work, neither the composition nor the technique of Dolly was particularly remarkable, except that unlike most others, it gazes back." The remark does double duty.
Lamp of Origins: Tan Mu's Illuminate and the First Practical Light
On the evening of December 31, 1879, Thomas Edison invited a crowd to his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey and demonstrated a device that would fundamentally alter the texture of human time. Before that night, artificial light meant flames: candles, oil lamps, gas jets.
The Photograph She Never Saw: Tan Mu's Turf and the Memory That Arrived From the Outside
In the 1980s, a professional soccer player in Yantai, China, was photographed in a posture that became a public image.
The Vial That Contained the Year: Tan Mu's Vaccine and the Object That Meant Everything
In the second week of December 2020, photographs of a small glass vial began appearing in newspapers, television broadcasts, and social media feeds around the world.
The Incomplete Map: Tan Mu's Chromosomes and the Dot That Connects Microscope to Telescope
On March 31, 2022, the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium announced the first objectively complete sequencing of the human genome, filling in the approximately eight percent of the genome that the original Human Genome Project had left unmapped when it published its draft in 2001 and its revised version in 2003.
The Circular Revolution: Tan Mu's The Pill and the Technological Control of Reproduction
In May 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved a pharmaceutical product that its manufacturer had initially wanted to call Enovid, a name that was subsequently rejected as too clinical and too likely to attract regulatory scrutiny.
Still Lives in Plague Time: Tan Mu's Yoga Isolation and the Monochrome Archive of Pandemic Distance
On June 21, 2020, the summer solstice, a group of people in Toronto gathered outdoors for a yoga class.
The First Cell of Light: Tan Mu's Illuminate and the Biology of Invention
On the last night of 1879, Thomas Edison lit a carbonized cotton thread inside a glass vessel at his Menlo Park laboratory and held it burning for forty-eight consecutive hours.
The Vial as Archive: Tan Mu's Vaccine and the Still Life of Crisis
In late 2020, a small glass vial became the most photographed object in human history. The Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, its contents glowing faintly amber, appeared on news broadcasts, social media feeds, government briefings, and personal photographs.
White Curtains in the White Cube: Tan Mu's Isolation and the Architecture of Separation
The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City hosts the International Auto Show, art fairs, and trade expos. In March 2020, it became something else.
First Week, 2022
On the fourteenth day after fertilization, a human embryo is six millimeters long, about the size of a lentil, and in Tan Mu's painting First Week this entire week of transformations occupies a canvas that measures 40 by 50 centimeters.
The Gemstone Inside the Body: Tan Mu's Epithelial Cells and the Painting That Reads Like a Lab
In a laboratory at a research institution, a dish of human epithelial cells sits on the stage of a fluorescence microscope.
The 8 Percent We Could Not See: Tan Mu's Chromosomes and the Incompleteness of Knowledge
On March 31, 2022, nearly one hundred scientists from the Telomere to Telomere Consortium published the first objectively complete sequence of a human genome.
The Weight of White: Monochrome, Crisis, and the Material Record in Tan Mu's Isolation
The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center was built to host trade shows. Its 840,000 square feet of floor space had accommodated the International Auto Show, Art Fair, Functional Fabric Fair, and the Cannabis World Congress and Business Expo.
Genetic Witness: Kiki Smith, ORLAN, and Tan Mu's IVF at the Threshold of Life
An egg cell is the largest single cell visible to the naked eye. A sperm cell requires three hundred times magnification to become legible. This asymmetry is a biological fact, but it is also a political one.
The Cellular Archive: Tan Mu's Embryo and the Magnification of Origin
The human embryo is a site of maximum information density and minimum physical scale. In its earliest stages, life is less an object than a program: a sequence of divisions, a migration of nuclei, a folding of membranes that anticipates the architecture of the body.
The Sheep That Looked Back: Tan Mu's Dolly and the Painting of Cloned Life
On July 5, 1996, a Finn Dorset sheep was born at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh. She was named Dolly, after Dolly Parton, because the somatic cell from which she was cloned had been harvested from a mammary gland.