Tan Yingjie

In an age when images are produced, copied, and replaced at an unprecedented speed, Tan Yingjie asks us to look beyond the finished image and consider how an image is made, shifted, and given new meaning.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

From September 18, 2026, Fotografiska Shanghai presents Nocturnal Reflections, an exhibition by Chinese artist Tan Yingjie. Marking the artist’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Shanghai, the exhibition brings together three works and groups of works spanning image sculpture, installation, and moving image.

Born in Hunan in 1992, Tan Yingjie graduated from the Department of Sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. His practice brings together installation, moving image, performance, and text-based imagery. Since 2019, he has been developing his ongoing concept of “image sculpture”: finding breaks within images, separating their visual fragments, and reconstructing them as objects that occupy physical space. By taking images beyond the picture plane, Tan explores how they can acquire a physical presence and generate narratives that extend beyond what they originally depicted.

At the centre of Nocturnal Reflections is Tan’s idea of “folding”. For the artist, making a photograph is already a form of transformation: light captures a moment of the physical world and fixes it onto a photosensitive surface. The resulting image can then be cut, turned, moved, or reassembled. With each intervention, its relationship to the original subject changes. Tan describes this process as “stress release”: images contain traces of the forces through which they were created and transformed, and his practice seeks to bring these hidden tensions back into view.

In Nocturnal Reflections, this process is imagined as a wind moving through the world. The wind becomes a metaphor for forces that can disturb, break apart, and rechape things that once seemed fixed. As images and objects are displaced, their fragments encounter one another in unexpected ways, creating new connections and narratives. The exhibition brings together three works that look into distinct aspects of this process: the everyday, the world on a larger scale, and personal memory.

House of Trivia is an inverted miniature building containing moving image sculptures and objects. Its five levels recreate the hidden interiors of familiar household machines and spaces, including a dishwasher, refrigerator, and sink. The work draws on Tan’s personal experience of moving house and living between two places. Inside the miniature house, everyday routines are repeated: things are sorted, stored, moved, and returned to their places. Through these small, repetitive actions, the work reflects on how the details of everyday life can accumulate, disappear, and leave traces behind. During the opening week, the installation will also become the setting for a live performance exploring the process of breaking the self apart and rebuilding it.

Night On Earth looks at images of the world on a monumental scale. Using public-domain images released by NASA, Tan removes the artificial lights from photographs of the Earth’s night side, leaving only the fading glow that remains as the lights go out. The work was inspired by a physical sensation the artist experienced while landing in an aircraft, when the landscape below appeared as layers that never quite aligned. We can piece these fragments together to imagine the whole, but can never see it all at once. Visitors are invited to enter the work, moving from looking at an image to experiencing it from within.

Encircling the gallery, the moving-image work The Long Floral Jourey focuses how memories are formed, altered, and eventually lost. An endoscopic camera travels through a tunnel of images, accompanied by voice-over and music. The narrative moves between childhood memories, stories of Republican-era China told by Tan’s grandfather, and experiences of losing loved ones. Memories do not remain fixed: remembering can lead to forgetting, while fragments that have been forgotten can return in unexpected ways. The approximately 15-minute film loops continuously, creating a dreamlike cycle in which images and memories repeatedly surface, overlap, and disappear.

In an age when images are produced, copied, and replaced at an unprecedented speed, Tan Yingjie asks us to look beyond the finished image and consider how an image is made, shifted, and given new meaning. Nocturnal Reflections invites audiences into this process, where pictures can be broken apart, displaced, and assembled anew. As visitors move through the exhibition, they encounter a world in which reality is never entirely fixed and where an image, once separated from its original context, can take on a different life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tan Yingjie was born in Hunan in 1992 and graduated from the Sculpture Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. His sculptures mainly focus on spatial installations and involve various media such as video, performance art, and textual images. Through the method of juxtaposition and grafting, he inserts his personal experiences into different specific spaces, thus constructing multiple narrative structures and heterogeneous spatial experiences. At the same time, he extends the tactile sensations of the body within the space. His recent works mainly focus on the misaligned narratives regenerated from deconstruction within real-life images, and generating new images via folding, flipping, and displacement.