After staging performances early in his career, Tang Maohong switched to painting, photography, and experimental animation as means to express his self-described crazy thoughts. Set in circular frames, the stills from his first animation, Orchid Finger (2004), echo the composition of traditional bird and flower paintings, but their surrealistic depictions—for instance, a blue pregnant woman or a headless, pants-less man standing next to a giant snail—more closely resemble a hallucinatory trip. A great deal of his work has sexual undertones, although the artist claims trying to decipher meaning in his work is futile and uninteresting: “There is no reason why it exists. It all happens by coincidence,” he says. Incorporating commercial illustration techniques, Tang’s “creepy-sexy animations” (as Time Out Shanghai once described them) raise the commercial practice into the realm of fine art.
After staging performances early in his career, Tang Maohong switched to painting, photography, and experimental animation as means to express his self-described crazy thoughts. Set in circular frames, the stills from his first animation, Orchid Finger (2004), echo the composition of traditional bird and flower paintings, but their surrealistic depictions—for instance, a blue pregnant woman or a headless, pants-less man standing next to a giant snail—more closely resemble a hallucinatory trip. A great deal of his work has sexual undertones, although the artist claims trying to decipher meaning in his work is futile and uninteresting: “There is no reason why it exists. It all happens by coincidence,” he says. Incorporating commercial illustration techniques, Tang’s “creepy-sexy animations” (as Time Out Shanghai once described them) raise the commercial practice into the realm of fine art.