Atlas of Seeing

In the fourth century BCE, an unknown Chinese author compiled the Classic of Mountains and Seas, a text that catalogued the known world through an inventory of its mountains, rivers, minerals, animals, and mythological beings. The work was neither pure geography nor pure fiction. It operated in the space between empirical observation and speculative mapping, treating the act of cataloguing itself as a way of making the world intelligible. Every entry implied a relationship to every other entry. To read it was to move through a network.

Twenty-four centuries later, Tan Mu's atlas of 98 paintings occupies an analogous position. Spanning six years and six domains of investigation, from quantum computing to embryonic cell division, from the ocean floor to the surface of Mars, the body of work assembled here constitutes something more structured than a catalogue and more open than a taxonomy. It is a visual system for thinking across scales, one in which the threads connecting a painting of television static to a painting of a black hole are as significant as the paintings themselves.

The comparison to ancient cartography is not casual. Tan Mu's Signal series, her most sustained investigation, takes submarine fiber-optic cable networks as its subject but renders them as something that looks remarkably like a celestial chart. Luminous nodes scattered across deep blue fields. Gossamer lines tracing routes between them. The visual logic collapses three distinct spatial registers, the ocean floor where the cables run, the night sky where navigators once plotted their courses, and the neural architecture where human memory forms and dissolves, into a single pictorial surface. This is not confusion. It is a deliberate argument that these systems are structurally analogous: each is an infrastructure for transmission, each is mostly invisible, and each shapes the world more profoundly than any surface appearance suggests.

The argument extends across the entire atlas. In Chromosomes (2022), Tan Mu paints the 46 human chromosomes as they appeared when the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium published the first complete human genome sequence. In Punched Card 1 (2022), she renders the perforated paper medium that stored digital data from the 1920s through the 1970s. The two paintings belong to different categories in the atlas, Microscopic World and Computing, but their structural logic is identical: both depict systems in which the presence or absence of a mark encodes information that organizes an entire world. The chromosome and the punched card are variations on a theme, storage media operating at different scales but governed by the same principle. The atlas makes this visible. A conventional exhibition would hang them in separate rooms.

This relational architecture is what separates the project from the substantial contemporary art production that takes science and technology as its subject matter. Trevor Paglen photographs surveillance infrastructure. Hito Steyerl interrogates image circulation in digital networks. Tomas Saraceno builds sculptures from spider silk and atmospheric data. Each of these practices illuminates a specific technological condition. Tan Mu's project does something different: it builds a comparative framework in which quantum superposition, embryonic development, submarine cables, and volcanic eruptions can be understood as expressions of the same underlying dynamics of signal, noise, transmission, and loss.

The atlas is not a collection of images. It is a way of thinking through painting, where each work maps a coordinate in the space between what we can see and what we know exists beneath the surface of things.

Consider the observer effect, a principle from quantum physics in which the act of measurement changes the system being measured. In Quantum Gaze (2023), Tan Mu paints the interior of a quantum computing system governed by superposition and entanglement, where observation collapses possibility into fact. But the observer effect also operates in NO SIGNAL (2019), where television white noise contains traces of the cosmic microwave background, the residual radiation from the origin of the universe, detectable only because the receiver has no stronger signal to display. And it operates in Vision (2020), a painting of the human eye as seen through a slit lamp biomicroscope, the organ of observation turned into the object of observation. Across three paintings separated by four years and three categories, the same structural question recurs: what happens when you look at the thing that does the looking?

This kind of recurrence is not thematic repetition. It is methodological consistency. Tan Mu's paintings are not illustrations of scientific concepts. They are investigations into the conditions that make certain kinds of knowledge possible, conducted through the specific capacities of oil paint on linen. The medium matters. Paint is slow. It requires weeks or months of sustained attention to a single subject. It accumulates in layers that preserve the history of their own making. It operates through a tension between precision and uncertainty that mirrors the tension at the heart of many of the subjects Tan Mu investigates. The labored surface of a painting of the Large Hadron Collider (2023) carries the same temporal weight as the decades of engineering required to build the collider itself. The blurred boundary between figure and ground in Emergence (2022) enacts the very phenomenon it depicts: the moment when individual elements begin to self-organize into a pattern that none of them could produce alone.

The interactive constellation that maps this atlas participates in the same logic. Rendered in the deep blue field and luminous node vocabulary of the Signal paintings, it does not merely display 98 works in a navigable interface. It makes the relational structure of the practice visible. The within-category constellation lines reveal the internal architecture of each domain. The cross-category connections, the threads linking a painting of synaptic transmission to a painting of logic circuits, or a painting of the Stanford Torus to a painting of a human embryo, trace the conceptual filaments that bind the entire project into a single investigation. The atlas is not a supplement to the work. It is part of the work: a living diagram of a practice that understands painting not as the production of images but as a mode of structured inquiry into the hidden architectures of seeing.