Zeqi Tang is a London-based artist working across portraiture and landscape. Her paintings explore the shifting relationship between self and other, and the ways psychological states can be externalised through figures, landscapes and imagined spaces.

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Her earlier series, The Theatre of Desire, examined how individual subjectivity can be disrupted within romantic relationships. In her recent portraits, solitary figures withdraw from the viewer’s gaze. Their faces are often indistinct, while clothing, posture and gesture become the primary expressions of identity and emotion. Absorbed in their interior worlds, the figures do not return the viewer’s gaze. This refusal unsettles the conventional relationship between viewer and viewed: the painted figure retains the position of subject, while the viewer is placed in the position of the other.

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Landscape functions not as the description of a specific location, but as an emotional and psychological space—at times becoming a second image through which a figure’s inner state is made visible. Tang relates these spaces to the Chinese tradition of reclusion and to European traditions of solitude and the sublime.

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Zeqi paints on rabbit-skin-glue-sized linen, combining controlled figuration with the unpredictable bleeding of oil paint. The taut yet vulnerable surface echoes the restrained psychological tension within the images. Working with indigo, raw umber, raw sienna and transparent glazes associated with classical painting, she creates quiet, melancholic atmospheres. Each canvas is proportioned in response to the bodily fragment or spatial encounter it depicts, becoming a container for an intimate, collected presence.