The Portrait of a Hole: Tan Mu's Sagittarius A* and the Obliteration of the Face

A face appears in the dark. Not clearly, not fully, not with the crisp delineation of features that a portrait conventionally provides. It emerges from a field of deep brown and umber and near black, the way a face emerges from sleep in the first seconds of waking, when the eyes open but the mind has not yet assembled what the optic nerve is transmitting into a coherent image. The face is blurred. It is moving, or it was moving when the photograph was taken, or the camera that captured it was moving, or the hand that held the camera trembled. Whatever the cause, the result is an image that occupies the territory between recognition and dissolution, a face that is almost there and almost gone, hovering at the threshold where the human features that allow identification, the planes of the forehead, the ridge of the nose, the shadowed hollows of the eyes, are present enough to register as a face but too distorted to register as a specific person. The painting is titled Sagittarius A* (2022), named after the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a region of spacetime where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape. The face in the painting is not a black hole. But the painting proposes, through the force of its visual logic, that a face in the process of being obliterated and a black hole at the center of a galaxy are, for the purposes of painting, the same subject: a center that attracts everything and reveals nothing.

The choice to paint a portrait where the title promises an astronomical object is the kind of decision that separates Tan Mu's practice from the broader category of science art, where subject matter is typically illustrated rather than transmuted. A painting titled Sagittarius A* that depicted the now famous Event Horizon Telescope image of the Milky Way's central black hole, a bright ring of superheated plasma surrounding a dark center, would be a competent translation of data into pigment. It would be what the public expects from a painter who works with scientific imagery: the conversion of a photograph into a painting, the substitution of brush for pixel. Tan Mu's painting does something categorically different. It does not depict the black hole. It performs the black hole. It takes the concept of an object that absorbs all light and gives nothing back, and it enacts that concept through the obliteration of the human face, the one subject in all of Western painting that carries the most concentrated expectation of legibility. To look at a portrait is to expect to see a person. To see a face dissolving into darkness is to experience the failure of that expectation, and that failure is the painting's subject, the gravitational collapse of recognition itself.

Gerhard Richter has spent six decades working the territory between photograph and painting, between the mechanical clarity of the camera and the subjective distortion of the brush. His photo paintings, begun in the early 1960s after his emigration from East to West Germany, take found or personal photographs as their source and translate them into oil on canvas with a characteristic blur, a softening of edges and dissolution of detail that is achieved by dragging a dry brush or a squeegee across the wet surface of the painting. The blur in Richter's work is not a failure of technique. It is the technique, a deliberate introduction of uncertainty into an image that the camera has rendered with total precision. In works like Woman Descending the Staircase (1965), derived from a paparazzi photograph, or the Betty paintings of the 1980s, or the vast Abstract Paintings that began in the 1970s, Richter uses the blur to create a space between the documentary certainty of the photograph and the interpretive freedom of the painting. The blurred image is less informative than the photograph it derives from. But it is more emotionally available, because the blur invites the viewer to project onto the image the feelings and associations that the sharp photograph forecloses.

The connection between Richter's blur and Tan Mu's blur is structural, not stylistic. Both artists use the technique to negotiate the relationship between a source image and the painting that emerges from it. But where Richter's source images are typically domestic or documentary, family photographs, newspaper clippings, snapshots of everyday life, Tan Mu's source images are drawn from the archive of scientific visualization, astronomical photographs, brain scans, satellite imagery, submarine cable maps. The blur in her work therefore carries a different charge. When Richter blurs a photograph of his daughter Betty turning away from the viewer, the blur registers the passage of time, the fading of memory, the distance between the present moment and the moment the photograph was taken. When Tan Mu blurs a face and titles it Sagittarius A*, the blur registers something else entirely: the inadequacy of human perception when confronted with an object that operates at a scale and in a register that the human sensorium was not designed to process. A black hole cannot be seen. It can only be inferred, from the behavior of light and matter in its vicinity. A face dissolving into darkness cannot be identified. It can only be felt, as a presence that is withdrawing from legibility. The two experiences, the astronomical and the psychological, converge in the painting's surface, where the same technique, the application and subsequent disruption of oil paint, produces the same effect: the registration of something that is real but unseeable.

The dimensions of the painting, oil on linen, 122 by 91 centimeters, place it in the register of the traditional portrait format, a size that invites the viewer to encounter the image at the distance of a face to face meeting, approximately one to two meters. At this distance, the blurred figure dominates the visual field, its features large enough to constitute a presence but too distorted to constitute an identity. The palette is severely restricted: burnt umber, raw umber, yellow ochre, and a near black that is not true black but a chromatic darkness made from the mixture of complementary colors, blues and browns and greens that cancel each other out to produce a depth that is warmer and more complex than a simple application of ivory black. The face itself, or the ghost of a face, is rendered in the lighter tones, the ochre and umber, with passages of white that catch the light at the forehead and the bridge of the nose. The surrounding ground is darker, the chromatic black, creating a contrast that is not the stark opposition of light and dark but a gradual transition, the face fading into the ground the way a star fades into the predawn sky, not disappearing but becoming indistinguishable from the medium that contains it.

The surface texture of the painting, visible in close up photographs, reveals the material history of its making. The paint is applied in broad, directional strokes that move vertically and diagonally across the canvas, the brush or palette knife leaving ridges and furrows that catch light and cast tiny shadows. In the area of the face, the strokes are more deliberate, more controlled, the marks that delineate the features applied with a precision that the subsequent blurring partially undoes. The viewer can see, in the texture of the paint, the moment when the image was clear and the moment when it was disrupted, the chronological sequence of the painting's making preserved in its surface like a geological stratum. This is a quality that oil painting possesses uniquely among visual media. A photograph records a single instant. A digital image is composed of discrete pixels that can be manipulated but that leave no trace of the manipulation in their material structure. An oil painting records its own history, each layer of paint superimposed on the layers beneath, each mark a deposit in a sedimentary record that can be read by the eye and the hand. The blur in Sagittarius A* is not a filter applied to a digital image. It is a physical event, a dragging of loaded bristles across a surface that resists and yields and retains the evidence of both the resistance and the yielding.

Francis Bacon provides the second art historical reference that makes the stakes of this painting legible. Bacon's portraits, which he insisted were not portraits in the conventional sense but "images" of his sitters, are among the most violently distorted depictions of the human face in the history of Western painting. In works like Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) or Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh IV (1957), the face is subjected to pressures that bend and smear and twist its features into configurations that are simultaneously recognizable and monstrous. The distortion in Bacon's work is not abstract. It is specific to the sitter, to the particular way their face distorts under the pressure of the painter's attention. Bacon said he wanted to trap the fact of his sitters, not their appearance but their presence, their being, the quality of consciousness that makes a face more than a collection of features. The trap he devised was violence, the application of force to the image until the features surrendered their conventional arrangement and revealed something that the smooth, flattering surface of a traditional portrait conceals: the fragility of the face, the contingency of identity, the ease with which the arrangement of eyes and nose and mouth that constitutes a recognizable self can be disrupted, rearranged, erased.

Tan Mu's painting participates in this tradition of violent portraiture but extends it in a direction that Bacon did not pursue. Bacon's distortion is centrifugal, pushing the features outward from the center, smearing them across the surface, stretching them beyond their natural proportions. Tan Mu's distortion is centripetal, pulling the features inward, toward a center that is not visible, a gravitational collapse that draws the face into itself rather than pushing it outward. The vertical streaking in the painting, the downward drag of the brush marks, creates a sense of pull, of something being drawn toward a point below the visible surface. This is the visual logic of the black hole, an object whose gravitational field is so intense that it warps spacetime in its vicinity, bending light around itself and creating, for a distant observer, the appearance of an absence, a hole in the fabric of the visible. The face in Tan Mu's painting is being drawn toward this absence. It is not exploding outward, as Bacon's faces do. It is collapsing inward, its features compressing and distorting as they approach a center that the painting does not depict because the center of a black hole, the singularity, is by definition a point where the physics of observation breaks down, where space and time cease to have meaning, where the distinction between something and nothing becomes undefined.

The astronomical subject of the painting warrants a closer look at the specific object it names. Sagittarius A* is the compact radio source at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, first detected by radio astronomers in 1974 and identified as a supermassive black hole through decades of observation of the orbits of stars in its vicinity. The star S2, for example, orbits Sagittarius A* with a period of approximately sixteen years, reaching speeds of up to three percent of the speed of light at its closest approach, a point known as periapsis, where it passes within 120 astronomical units of the black hole's event horizon. The existence of Sagittarius A* was confirmed by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration in May 2022, when the same team that had imaged the black hole in the galaxy M87, Powehi, released the first direct image of the Milky Way's central black hole. The image shows a bright ring of superheated plasma, the accretion disk, surrounding a dark central shadow, the silhouette of the event horizon. The ring is asymmetric, brighter on one side than the other, because the plasma on the approaching side of the disk is blueshifted by its velocity toward the observer, while the plasma on the receding side is redshifted by its velocity away.

Tan Mu painted Sagittarius A* in the same year the Event Horizon Telescope released its image, 2022. The timing is not coincidental. It is the same impulse that produced Powehi (2022), the painting of the M87* black hole that was directly inspired by the 2019 EHT image. But where Powehi translates the astronomical photograph into a luminous, scientifically legible image, a painting that a viewer with knowledge of the EHT data can read as a rendering of a specific astrophysical phenomenon, Sagittarius A* refuses this legibility. It does not show the accretion disk. It does not show the event horizon's shadow. It shows a face, dissolving, and it asks the viewer to understand the face and the black hole as aspects of the same phenomenon: the gravitational collapse of the visible into the invisible, the moment when a thing that can be seen becomes a thing that can only be inferred, from the behavior of the light and matter around it.

Li Yizhuo, in her 2022 essay "Imaginary of an Image," observes that Tan Mu's canvases "do not aim at diagnosing the modern spectacles from a distance. They conjure up a kind of vitality and depth of their own." The observation illuminates something about Sagittarius A* that a purely art historical analysis might miss. The painting does not diagnose the spectacle of the black hole image, does not deconstruct the media event of the EHT release, does not interrogate the politics of scientific visualization. It conjures, from the raw material of a blurred face and a dark ground, a presence that belongs to the painting alone, a vitality that is not borrowed from the source image but generated by the act of painting itself. The oil paint, applied in thick directional strokes and then partially disrupted, produces a surface that vibrates with a tension the source photograph, whatever it was, did not possess. This is the transformation that distinguishes Tan Mu's practice from illustration: the painting does not reproduce the world. It produces a new world, one that shares certain formal characteristics with the source, the blur, the darkness, the human presence, but that operates according to its own material logic, the logic of pigment and linen and time.

Li Yizhuo further notes that Tan Mu's "way of looking aligns with the Chinese philosophical lineage of ge wu zhi zhi that investigates things to extend knowledge, examining and discerning objects of various scales and conditions." The principle of ge wu zhi zhi, drawn from the Great Learning, one of the Four Books of Confucian philosophy, holds that the investigation of things leads to the extension of knowledge, that careful, sustained attention to the particular reveals the universal. In the context of Sagittarius A*, this principle operates in reverse. The universal, the black hole, the object of astronomical scale, is investigated through the particular, the face, the object of intimate scale. The painting does not begin with the face and extend outward to the cosmos. It begins with the cosmos and collapses inward to the face, the black hole's gravity pulling the astronomical concept through the needle's eye of a human countenance, compressing the vast into the intimate, the invisible into the almost visible, the unknowable into the almost recognizable.

There is a category of astronomical objects known as ultra compact dwarfs, galaxies so dense that their stars are packed more tightly than in any other known type of galaxy. They are smaller than typical galaxies but larger than star clusters, occupying an ambiguous zone in the taxonomy of cosmic structures. Sagittarius A*, the painting, occupies a similar ambiguous zone in the taxonomy of Tan Mu's practice. It is smaller than the monumental canvases of the Signal series or the Emergence painting. It is larger than the intimate studies of cells and embryos. It is a portrait that is not a portrait, an astronomical image that is not astronomical, a painting about a black hole that depicts a face. These contradictions are not flaws. They are the painting's method, the way it generates meaning, by refusing to resolve into a single category, by insisting on the coexistence of registers that the viewer's mind would prefer to keep separate. The face and the black hole are not analogies for each other. They are the same thing, seen from different distances. At the scale of the body, a face dissolving into darkness is a loss of identity, a moment of existential vertigo. At the scale of the galaxy, a black hole absorbing light is a loss of information, a moment of cosmological vertigo. The painting holds both scales in a single frame, 122 by 91 centimeters of oil on linen, and asks the viewer to feel, in their body, the vertigo of both.

Caspar David Friedrich painted a man standing at the edge of a precipice, his back to the viewer, gazing out over a sea of fog that stretches to the horizon. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) is the paradigmatic image of the Romantic sublime, the human figure dwarfed by the immensity of nature, the individual consciousness confronting a totality it cannot comprehend. Friedrich's figure faces outward, toward the vastness. Tan Mu's figure, if it can be called a figure, faces inward, toward dissolution. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is not a landscape to be contemplated from a safe distance. It is a force that bends space and time, that pulls matter and light into a region from which no signal returns. The face in Sagittarius A* is not gazing at this force. It is being drawn into it, its features compressing and distorting as they approach the singularity, the point where the painting's surface, like the spacetime it depicts, ceases to be smooth and becomes infinitely curved, infinitely dense, infinitely dark. The painting does not show this moment. It shows the moment before, the last moment in which a face is still recognizable, the last moment in which a viewer can look at the painting and say, that is a person, that is a human being, that is someone who was here and is now, slowly, irrevocably, being pulled away.