策展人 | Curator: 杨鉴 | Yang Jian

Tan Yongqing: The 6th Day

策展人 | Curator: 杨鉴 | Yang Jian

艺术家 | Artist: 谭永勍 | Tan Yongqing

展览时间 | Exhibition Dates:

2026.5.20-2026.6.20

地点 | Venue:

蜂巢 | 北京  Hive | Beijing

地址｜Address.

北京市酒仙桥路4号798艺术区E06

E06, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce that, as part of Gallery Week Beijing 2026, a major solo exhibition by artist Tan Yongqing, “The 6th Day”, will open on May 20, 2026, in Hive | Beijing Headquarters’ Exhibition Hall A. .This exhibition marks Tan Yongqing’s third solo presentation with Hive and his first major exhibition in Beijing since participating in the “Hive Becoming” emerging artist program in 2019. Widely regarded as one of the most prominent artists of China’s post-1990 generation, Tan Yongqing has developed a distinctly recognizable painterly language marked by restraint and composure, keenly observing the psychological conditions of contemporary society and its era. While pursuing a certain precision toward the spirit of the present moment, Tan renders deeply concealed yet emotionally resonant contemporary mythologies shaped by technological progress and historical turning points through a highly personal perspective. Curated by Yang Jian, the exhibition will remain on view through June 20, 2026.

Tan Yongqing’s work possesses a highly distinctive visual language that resists easy definition or categorization, revealing multifaceted and non-linear references to technology, philosophy, literature, and sociology. He consistently attempts to extract the essential elements of human experience and transform them into anticipatory forms of image, symbol, and emotion. His paintings often carry an atmosphere of melancholy and nostalgia, lingering within fleeting, dreamlike psychological states while continually pointing toward an unnamed future. Grounded in the contradictory coexistence of humanity, divinity, and technology, these works engage with themes that are at once enigmatic and deeply personal. Central to Tan’s practice is his recurring use of figures drawn both from his immediate surroundings and from history itself — figures who function simultaneously as forces sustaining the continuity of the world and as witnesses who confront and unravel the chaos of reality.

The exhibition title, The 6th Day, derives from the Book of Genesis, referring to the sixth day on which God created humankind in His own image — an act that also seemed to establish a sacred boundary around the irreproducibility of life itself. Yet today, under the temptations of artificial intelligence and generative technologies, humanity continuously creates new forms of the unknown, as though trespassing upon the authority of creation itself. Algorithms may replicate physical form and even thought, but lived existence, free will, and the soul shaped through direct experience remain humanity’s final trace of the divine. At the same time, these very qualities are increasingly regarded as the ultimate criteria for determining whether artificial intelligence might one day achieve true “creation.” Should that moment arrive, would it signify the apotheosis of artificial intelligence — completing a Möbius strip in which humanity and divinity mutually generate one another?

Although never fully predetermined from the outset, Tan Yongqing’s paintings gradually “open up time” within their internal narrative structures through a combination of rational observation and acute intuition. Immortal mythologies point toward an indelible past saturated with sensibility and divinity, while science and artificial intelligence suggest absolute rationality alongside the collapse of primordial belief systems. Through painting — perhaps the medium most capable of stitching together incompatible realities — Tan attempts to construct a paradoxical closed loop: one that cannot exist materially, yet can still be genuinely perceived and emotionally experienced. What the artist creates becomes intertwined with that which emerges from the void, together generating a temporal structure in which past, present, and future coexist simultaneously. Consequently, the conventional concepts through which we understand “past,” “present,” and “future” begin to dissolve.

The chaotically entangled conception of time and space within Tan Yongqing’s paintings resembles an irreversible convergence moving from two opposite directions of time toward a point that does not truly exist. The pursuit of this convergence emerges precisely because of its absence: without it, the loop cannot be formed, and time itself collapses into annihilation. Yet in the instant of convergence, the loop seals itself, giving rise to a point of void which, in turn, ceases to remain void. From that moment onward, meaning begins once again to unfold in both temporal directions. The extraordinary visual experiences and philosophical spaces generated through these collisions of nothingness constitute the elusive yet meaningful convergence that Tan Yongqing persistently seeks throughout his paintings — a state in which past and future, things that should never have coexisted, acquire meaning within the void itself.
The exhibition will also feature a spatial design inspired by the form of the ensō (禅圆), the Zen circle traditionally symbolizing enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and emptiness. Organized through a singular viewing path, the exhibition constructs both a cycle and a closed loop through a deliberately linear spatial structure. Yet this circulation functions less as a rigid narrative than as a symbolic prompt designed to activate perception itself. The cycle ultimately becomes a form of intersection — a point of convergence in its own right. If viewed from a sufficient distance, the entire exhibition may ultimately reveal itself as nothing more than a point of origin for future artistic possibilities.