Lacquer Before Lacquer
— Miao Tan Solo Exhibition
London, 04- 06 September, 2026
Lacquer Before Lacquer — Miao Tan Solo Exhibition
Rather than introducing lacquer to a UK audience as a craft tradition with a glossary attached, the exhibition follows how Miao Tan encounters the material, argues with it, and is changed by it, so visitors can meet lacquer the way she did, without being told what to think of it first.
The exhibition opens with Tan’s own account of encountering raw lacquer for the first time, tapping trees in a working lacquer forest in Chengkou, Chongqing, China, and tasting the sap straight from the cut. “It hit instantly, an intense, clean fragrance unlike anything I’d known,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards. I understood, suddenly, why people call it addictive.” Lacquer is introduced here through first-person experience: sensory, physical, and unresolved.
From there, lacquer returns to one of its earliest functions: an adhesive, binding horsehair and thread into sculptural brushes that never repeat the same shape twice, objects with no stable centre of gravity. A selection of these smaller brushes will be available for visitors to hold, each shaped differently, asking the hand to find its own grip rather than settling into one already provided. Facing them hangs Yielding, a painting made with these brushes, none created with a specific function in mind, as if to ask whether functionality lives inside a tool at all, or whether it is negotiated each time between the tool’s form and the body that adapts to it.
Curator: umum+ studio
Location: KOPPEL Collective, London, UK
Event Photos
