Tian Yang
Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive
6.2.2026-1.3.2026
Opening 5.2. 18:00-20:00
English
Myymälä2 proudly presents “Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive”, the first exhibition in Finland by Yang Tian, a multimedia artist working between Beijing and Paris. Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive investigates and presents in the exhibition space artworks which trace an entangled legacy that the pandemic left on bodies, institutions, and material culture. Yang uses diagnostic apparatus and laboratory paraphernalia —centrifuge tubes, antigen kits, ELISA strips—and reframes clinical detritus as archival agents: vessels that store both data and memory. With a highly studied visual strategy and a meticulously prepared installation, the exhibition explores how systems of control and care inscribe themselves on matter, and how organic processes (growth, decay, spore) interact with institutional forms. Through installation, sculpture, photography, and moving image, the exhibition asks: What happens when narratives are tightened—when truth exists as a suspended equilibrium, held in place yet always at risk of rupturing?
Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive begins with a small yet structurally forceful gesture: the tightening of centrifuge tube lids onto the delicate edge of a newspaper. The newspaper—an archetype of public discourse—trembles between being held and being torn. Its fragile margin becomes the threshold on which truth is performed, filtered, and continually rewritten within systems of power created by the endless dissemination of the mass media apparatus.
The exhibition curator Ramiro Camelo distils the core vision of the exhibition by explaining that “Tightened Narratives captures a defining moment of our era. Rather than treating the COVID-19 experience as a closed chapter, Yang’s work acknowledges how its emotional and psychological impact and trauma continue to echo through collective memory. The exhibition stands as a reliable testament to that shared period, documenting its lasting imprint. One can say that Yang tries to alert us: humanity became aware that the concept of any viable future depends on our ability to respond together—demonstrating resilience, flexibility, and cooperative action in the face of crisis.”
Yang attempts to make evident that although the pandemic has ended, the forces of its hidden aftermath — surveillance, verification, bureaucratic language, and informational pressure — have intensified and persist as post-biological residues. They operate quietly, like muscle memories embedded within bodies and infrastructures and will influence society in the long term.
ARTIST BIO
Yang Tian (b. 1993, Beijing) is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and poetic writing. His practice investigates how systems of control, memory, and language manifest in physical form—through humble, clinical, or industrial materials such as centrifuge tubes, iron, wood, and brass. Often drawing from post-pandemic experiences and research into traditional metal techniques, his works quietly trace the fractures between power and identity, belief and constraint. Rooted in both conceptual clarity and material intimacy, his installations and forged pieces unfold at the intersection of fragility and resistance. He has exhibited in China, Japan, South Korea, France, Australia, Greece, the United Kingdom, among others.
His recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Ephemeral + Eternal = Existential — Rendering of Absence’, Absent Gallery, Guangzhou, China （2025) and ‘Apparatus of Memory’ LP Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2025) recent group exhibitions: ‘Little Treasures – Small-Scale Art from the Collection of Brian Wallace’, Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, China （2025); ‘Traces of Becoming: The Contemporary’, DOC. Park, Guangzhou, China （2025), “Ritan Impressions, Seven Pavilions of Ritan — A contemporary dialogue between history and modernity in one of Beijing’s most revered imperial altars’. Beijing, China （2025) and Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, Sydney, Australia (2025). Yang Tian lives and works between Paris, Beijing.
Instagram:@yangtian_art
Exhibition Curated by Ramiro Camelo
Suomeksi
Myymälä2 ylpeänä esittää Tian Yangin näyttelyn Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive. Tian Yang on multimediataiteilija, joka työskentelee Pekingissä ja Pariisissa. Näyttely on taiteilijan ensimmäinen Suomessa. Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive -näyttelyssä nähtävät teokset käsittelevät koronaviruspandemian monisyistä vaikutusta kehoihin, instituutioihin ja materiaaliseen kulttuuriin. Yang hyödyntää diagnostisia välineistöä ja laboratoriotarvikkeita – kuten koeputkia ja antigeenisiä testipakkauksia — ja kehystää nämä kliiniset jätteet arkistoiksi, jotka säilyttävät sekä dataa että muistoja. Tarkasti puntaroidun visuaalisen menetelmän ja huolellisesti valmistellun installaation avulla näyttely tarkastelee kontrollin ja hoivan piirtymistä materiaan sekä vuorovaikutusta orgaanisten prosessien (kuten kasvun, hajoamisen ja itiöiden) ja instituutioiden välillä. Installaation, veistosten, valokuvauksen ja liikkuvan kuvan keinoin näyttely kysyy, mitä tapahtuu kun narratiiveja rajoitetaan: kun totuus on staattisessa tasapainossa, paikallaan ja kuitenkin jatkuvasti murroksen kynnyksellä?
Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive alkaa pienellä, mutta merkityksellisellä eleellä: sulkemalla koeputkien korkkeja sanomalehtipaperin ohuen reunan ympärille. Sanomalehti, julkisen keskustelun perikuva, tasapainottelee paineen ja repeämisen välillä. Paperin reuna on kynnys, jolla totuutta performoidaan ja suodatetaan; loputtoman massamedialevityksen vahvistamat instituutiot kirjoittavat sitä jatkuvasti uusiksi.
Näyttelyn kuraattori Ramiro Camelo tuo esiin näyttelyn ydinajatuksen: “Tightened Narratives vangitsee aikakauttamme määrittävän hetken. Yang ei katso koronaviruspandemian kuuluvan vain menneisyyteen vaan huomioi taiteessaan pandemian yhä jatkuvan emotionaalisen ja psykologisen vaikutuksen sekä kollektiivisessa muistissa säilyvän trauman. Näyttely on vakuuttava todistus tuosta ajanjaksosta ja tallentaa sen jättämän pysyvän jäljen. Yang pyrkii varoittamaan meitä: ihmiskunta on tiedostanut, että mahdollisuutemme elinkelpoiseen tulevaisuuteen riippuvat kyvystämme reagoida, sopeutua ja työskennellä lannistumatta yhdessä kriisien torjumiseksi.”
Yang haluaa näyttää, että vaikka pandemia on ohi, sen piilevät jälkivaikutukset – valvonta, todentaminen, byrokraattinen kielenkäyttö ja tiedollinen paine – ovat voimistuneet ja jatkavat olemassaoloaan jälkibiologisina jäännöksinä. Kehollisten tai rakenteellisten muistijälkien tavoin ne vaikuttavat hiljaisesti ja pitkään yhteiskunnassamme.
TAITEILIJA BIO
Yang Tian (s. 1993, Peking) on monialainen taiteilija, joka työskentelee installaation, veiston ja runouden parissa. Hän käsittelee taiteellisessa työssään sitä, miten hallinnan, muistin ja kielen rakenteet ilmenevät konkreettisessa muodossa, ja hyödyntää yksinkertaisia kliinisiä tai teollisia materiaaleja kuten koeputkia, rautaa, puuta ja messinkiä. Yang ammentaa usein pandemian jälkeisistä kokemuksista ja perinteisistä metallintyöstötekniikoista; hänen taiteensa valottaa vallan ja identiteetin sekä uskomusten ja rajoitteiden välisiä vastakkainasetteluita. Teoksille on ominaista käsitteellinen selkeys ja intiimi suhde käytettävään materiaaliin. Hänen installaationsa ja metalliteoksensa asettuvat haurauden ja vastarinnan risteyskohtaan. Yangin teoksia on ollut esillä muun muassa Kiinassa, Japanissa, Etelä-Koreassa, Ranskassa, Australiassa, Kreikassa ja Iso-Britanniassa.
Yangin viimeisimpiä yksityisnäyttelyitä ovat olleet ‘Ephemeral + Eternal = Existential — Rendering of Absence’, Absent Gallery, Guangzhou, Kiina（2025) ja ‘Apparatus of Memory’ LP Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2025). Hän on ollut mukana ryhmänäyttelyissä: ‘Little Treasures – Small-Scale Art from the Collection of Brian Wallace’, Red Gate Gallery, Peking, Kiina （2025); ‘Traces of Becoming: The Contemporary’, DOC. Park, Guangzhou, Kiina （2025), “Ritan Impressions, Seven Pavilions of Ritan — A contemporary dialogue between history and modernity in one of Beijing’s most revered imperial altars’. Peking, Kiina（2025) ja Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, Sydney, Australia (2025). Yang Tian asuu ja työskentelee Pariisissa ja Pekingissä.
Instagram: @yangtian_art
Näyttelyn on kuratoinut Ramiro Camelo.
“Tightened Narratives, a metaphor against contemporary amnesia”
By Ramiro Camelo
The eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) coined the saying “Protest against forgetting”, insisting and urging people to revisit historic events and so forth, keeping alive a sense of the past. In doing so, he encouraged us to avoid “The age of forgetting”, which he saw as a cynical symptom generated by the rapid pace of change and the nature of modern capitalism. The ubiquitous curator Hans Ulrich Obrist recalls that in a conversation with Hobsbawm, he mentioned, “Memory is key for the 21st century, as maybe amnesia is at the core of the digital age.”
It is no surprise, therefore, that when artists wish to ensure that certain events, phenomena, and traumatic experiences can be remembered in the collective memory, they naturally turn to using objects and paraphernalia to reenact remembrance within exhibition spaces. In other words, artists use archival vestiges, build narratives, assemble stories, collect documents, remaining traces and other strategies perceived as necessary—if not sufficient—for ensuring a permanence and revisiting collective memories, which some individuals may wish or prefer to forget. Can anyone forget or pretend to forget the far-reaching effects of COVID-19?
Although now over six years since the first cases of a global pandemic, the impact of COVID-19 is still keenly felt around the globe, and these artistic responses are undoubtedly only a fraction of the story that lies beneath or has been forgotten. Tian Yang is an artist particularly capable of helping us understand the individual and collective experiences of a pandemic that reshaped our daily life, culture, and relationships; in this sense, his project “Tightened Narratives — Post-Biological Archive” focuses on tracing the aftermath of the pandemic on bodies, institutions, and society in general. With a very precise commitment, his recent practice expresses profound ethical, aesthetic, and critical concerns about the pandemic legacy. He questions how the virus impacted humanity and explores health protocols, social, racial, and economic disparities.
Tian Yang’s sculptural installation-based works often utilise equipment and implements from medical laboratories, clinical pathology kits, virology research, synthetic biology, and genomics. For the installation of “Tightened Narratives,” his starting point is the use of newspaper sheets supported and gripped by laboratory centrifuge tubes, a move he calls a ‘small yet structurally forced gesture’. For Tian Yang, using newspapers provokes his personal memories and gloomy recollections of the pandemic period. In a broader sense, the suspension of the paper sheets serves as a visual metaphor for the precariousness of providing a believable account of honesty and veracity, something that mass media repeatedly fails to do. The installation also recognises that printed news, which in a short period of time became irrelevant or “old news,” serves as a perfect symbol to represent the ephemerality and instability of what is presented as truth.
If something tends to denote something else, then the intentionally chaotic and anarchic arrangement of the newspaper sheets may imply that trauma resists linear narration. Likewise, considering the installation’s notions of lightness, drifting, and floating, one can say, bewildered, that, as Italo Calvino suggested, lightness is a reaction against the gravity of existence, a method to lift the spirit and find new ways of thinking and acting.
Ultimately, “Tightened Narratives” captures a defining moment of our era. Rather than treating the COVID-19 experience as a closed chapter, Tian Yang’s inquiry acknowledges how its emotional and psychological impact and trauma continue to echo through collective memory. In other words, with his clever questions—around which the exhibition gravitates: “What happens when narratives are tightened — when truth exists as a suspended equilibrium, held in place yet always at risk of rupturing?”—we might or might not find an answer. In the meantime, one can think that Tian Yang is almost making it evident that, in the most difficult times, crisis is both the thing that shapes history and the engine of that very history.
The exhibition stands as a reliable testament to that shared period, documenting its lasting imprint. One could say that Tian Yang tries to alert us: humanity has become aware that the concept of any viable future depends on our ability to respond together—demonstrating resilience, flexibility, and cooperative action in the face of disaster. He also prompts us to exercise and revisit our memory in order to counteract the amnesia of the digital age that Hobsbawm alluded to.