I am creating my utopia – a buffer zone full of rules and chaos.

My painting is rooted in my upbringing and the factors of the times. Born in China, I have witnessed the sudden rise of the city. With the expansion of cities and the explosion of population, the proliferation of homogenised buildings and manufactured landscapes has made me obsessed with the word “landscape” and keen to reshape it. At the same time, in the context of the fierce collision between Eastern and Western politics and cultures, keywords such as collective memory, geopolitics, individual discourse power, and industrialisation process constitute the main framework of my painting.

The personal is universal; I want to question self-positioning through the reshaping of landscape and produce instinctive and sensual images by exploring self-subconsciousness, memory and reality. I aim to weaken the inherent barriers of language to a certain extent through my painting and have a dialogue with the audience at the core level of the problem. There is no specific topic for those questions, but for me, asking questions is far more important than giving answers.

Cao Tang (1997, Nanchong) is a painter from China who graduated from ArtEZ in 2021 and is currently living and working in the Netherlands.