Mingjia Tang

Mingjia Tang (b.1997) is an artist from Chongqing, China. After graduating from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, she went on to study Photography at Royal College of Art. Her art practice expands from videos, analogue photos to digital images, and relates to various themes including feminism, surveillance, urbanism, and the ontology of photography.

Inspired by many writers including Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigary, Sara Ahmed, and so on, her current work focuses on Chinese feminism, defying the long-lasting patriarchal system and its current political presentation from the perspective of a young Chinese woman.

This ongoing project originates from an accident when developing films, which motivated the artist to delve into materialism and post-structuralism. By questioning the ontology of photography and its relationship with humans, Mingjia has developed the project through both experimental and theoretical practice.

Upcoming Exhibitions:

3-10th July, 2023 // Off-RCA, Arles, France

13th-16th July, 2023 // RCA Graduate Show, Truman Brewery, London

This project is about considering photography as an event, a complete series of happenings made by careless and deliberate choices. The digital camera helps to shorten this process for the sake of higher efficiency, but it also largely abbreviates the meaning of what it takes to make an image. The result can be seen from our numbness in producing and consuming limitless photos without heeding the subjectivity of images.

Conversely, analog film as a troublesome medium for generating images seems to bring us closer to the essence of images by exposing the seemingly redundant but necessary procedures. Hands, fingers, eyes, touch, minds, chemicals, tools, machines, darkness, time, space, temperature, moisture, air, wind, dust, photons and so on all contribute to the life of an image, so the image is not merely a passive receptor activated by the signal to execute the commands. Image is a material-based experience involving countless kinetic events of matter as articulated by Thomas Nail.

What appears on the transparent film as mystical fragmented traces of movements are entangled in ineffable causality. The flow of matter is challenging the edge of the image, which itself is unlimited, free, with no boundary, as if from an unknown dimension.

Light on the film,

photons over silver salts.

In this sealed space,

liquid flows,

matter wanders.

March 2023, London