At the crux of Yongqi Tang’s body of work lies the artist’s physical body encounter with ghosts of the art historical. References to painters such as William Blake and Peter Paul Rubens rest like a classical underbelly in her works as she then begins to insert her own body into the picture. The twist of this self-insertion comes in the details: the tracing of a scar across the spine, a bloodied slit down a patch of skin, the floating aura of a surgeon drawn in charcoal and placed in the corner of a canvas. Tang’s lifelong experience with scoliosis and subsequent surgery at nineteen brings back the pain of my own ordeal with Hashimoto’s disease and a mirrored time when I had my first surgery at nineteen. The direct invasiveness and intrusiveness of biopsies, surgeries, needles, and doctors is the painful reminder one needs to come back into the body and how fragile our flesh truly is when something goes wrong. 

Tang’s charcoal drawings exist as independent art pieces rather than preliminary studies of her oil on canvases. Across both mediums, mark-making that is created and simultaneously erased as the piece is made showcases her ability to trace time. The artist becomes the surgeon herself: suturing and layering together images on top of each other, extracting them altogether, and engaging in a process that is very much collaging in its own right. In sitting slowly with art-making, Tang resists the fast-paced acquisition and rush for instant gratification that pervades our access-at-all-times global world. In vocalizing how society’s deepest wants align with financial materiality or social reputation that can never be latched onto, Tang affirms how bodies are the sole, tangible vessel that will always belong to one in the end, no matter what immediate attack or state-sanctioned violation against them.