In his first solo exhibition at Space Cottonseed, Guo-Liang Tan brings together a body of paintings referencing images of traditional floral still lifes found online. Using the genre as a vehicle for image making and conceptual enquiries, Tan’s haunting revisitation investigates our perceived notions of representation and reexamines the condition of painting itself. Seemingly conventional and peripheral, these lightweight flower paintings can denote a sense of the decorative while simultaneously hint at the gravitas of the historical.

In Tan’s ghostly versions, the flowers are taken out of containers once used to hold the original compositions and laid plainly in the foreground, sometimes taking on the shape of vessels themselves. Dislocated from their original contexts, the material fragments and gestural markings are restaged and suspended with a pronounced degree of theatricality and stillness, almost to the point of abstraction. In so doing, Tan invites us to take a closer look at the painted surface and as it were, converse with its specificity and physicality, along with all its allusion.