Rediscovering Venus: Brutal Origins and Defiant resilience in Yongqi Tang’s The Open Venus

Opening the Venus, 2024. Mixed Media on canvas. 47 x 57 in. Photo courtesy of Latitude Gallery

By CLARE GEMIMA October 28, 2024

Yongqi Tang’s The Open Venus, exhibited at Latitude Gallery, is a compelling examination of mythology, bodily transformation, and personal resilience. Her newest series of paintings, drawings and collages reinterpret the myth of Venus, and contrast the Goddess’s idealized beauty with the brutal and grotesque origins of her conception. Drawing from her own experience with scoliosis surgery, Tang presents her figures as both vulnerable and resilient, inviting her viewers to see the the body not merely as a physical vessel, but as a symbolic terrain of regeneration. The Open Venus underscores the inseparable link between the pain of recovery, and the enduring hope for renewal.

Persephone, 2024. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 16 x 16 in. Photo courtesy of Latitude Gallery

Tang confronts Botticelli’s serene portrayal of Venus by unraveling the Godesses's violent origins detailed in Greek mythology—born from the blood and sperm of Uranus, after Cronus severed his genitals and cast them into the sea. Contrasting soft, flowing lines with jagged, fragmented edges to depict the goddess as a vulnerable, visceral being breaking free, Tang has evidently shifted away from the themes that were present in her previous solo-show Lullaby (exhibited at Jupiter in 2023), which centered on 17th-century Chinese ghost tales and the mythic qualities of the Middle Ages.

While Lullaby invoked a world of moralistic fables drawn from Chinese literati, The Open Venus observes Western art’s timeline, and its pertinent painterly devices used to depict particular versions of Venus — the Goddess of all matters concerning love, and the ultimate character of vulnerability, power and divine beauty. Tang's exploration reveals her interest in transforming traditional allegories—those originally steeped in social and moral codes—into mirrors reflecting the turbulence of the present day. 

“Sometimes we idealize so much that we neglect and sometimes proactively conceal the imperfections of reality. I empathize with the version of Venus who was emerging from the blood. I imagined her breaking from the castrated testicles, and struggling like a baby chick.” - Yongqi Tang, 2024  

The Blood, 2024. Oil on wooden panel. 16 x 16 in. Photo courtesy of Latitude Gallery

Opening the Venus (2024), referencing William Blake’s Oberon, Titania and Puck (1786), and Henri Matisse’s La Danse (1910), contrasts carefree, fluid movements with miserable and weighted immobility. This tension reflects Tang’s personal struggles with recovery and bodily disconnection, and also explores the broader battle between the physicality of the real body and ethereal ideals of beauty. The large, fuscia toned canvas not only grapples with the severity of recovery, but also emphasizes the value of reconnecting with the body on a higher level.

“By intertwining mythological and personal narratives, I would like to present and juxtapose the timeless body (Venus) and the ephemeral body (myself). They are distinct yet inseparable from one another.” Yongqi Tang, 2024. 

In works like The Blood, Tang makes her body visible by leaving fingerprints along the edges of its panel, embedded in layers of browny-red oil paint that reveal a tactile, labor-of-love type quality. For Tang, these traces of movement, along with overlapping layers, studies, and revisions, document an intimate record of time, and echo the raw physicality central to her research. Rejecting refinement in favor of visceral marks, she creates compositions that pulse with bodily immediacy, reflecting her intent to expose the temporality of experiences that unfold throughout her painting process.

The Wound, 2024. Oil on wooden panel. 16 x 16 in. Photo courtesy of Latitude Gallery

In The Wound, heavy, textured brushstrokes derive from classical depictions of the suffering female form, such as Rembrandt’s Lucretia (1666). The layers of paint suggest the tensions between fragility and strength, and capture moments before the wound is penetrated or infected. This exploration is also present in Persephone, where the subject is poised at the threshold of pain.

In Knight Peeing in a Landscape, Tang reimagines an armoured knight with rugged, cement-like textures that reflect both the harshness of the figure and its environment. The act of 'marking territory' critiques masculinity’s historical associations with power and conquest, while Dog Pooping in a Landscape provides a snapshot of the type of vulnerabilities that come with territoriality, shown through a dog’s anxious expression in an act of defecation. Together, these works amplify the dark humor that underscores the primal nature inherent in all types of sentient beings.

Knight Peeing in a Landscape, 2024. Mixed media on canvas. 18 x 24 in. Dog Pooping in a Landscape, 2024. Oil on canvas. 36 x 41 in. (Diptyque). Photo courtesy of Latitude Gallery

Tang’s textured interventions reject idealized beauty, and present Venus as flawed as any human. Through her application of cracking, raw, and layered textures, and reinterpretation of ancient symbols, narratives and artistic metaphors, Tang has created paintings that highlight the painful contradictions between one’s body and mind. Her work reminds us that pain and healing are intertwined, offering a courageous vision that unites the beauty and violence experienced in both physical and mental realms.

Yongqi Tang’s The Open Venus re-seams the divides between beauty, pain, and resilience, and leaves viewers with a powerful acceptance of fragility—the permanent survival scars from torturous, yet enlightened transformations that Tang herself, as well as the mythological Venus, have endured.

Yongqi Tang's The Open Venus

October 10 - November 11, 2024

Latitude Gallery 64 Bayard St Storefront A, New York.