Cyrus Tang is a visual artist interested in the sentiment of nostalgia. Her work frequently examines the paradoxes of appearance and disappearance, and ephemerality and permanence, through the reconstruction of mental images and sensations in permanent materials.

Tang’s project Time fell asleep in the evening rain, 2022, draws heavily on the artist’s personal experiences in an attempt to memorialise images that represent the collective experience of the pandemic in Melbourne. The result is a series of haunting and ethereal composite images, each ruminating on a single recurrent motif – including suburban street trees – that reconstructs and makes permanent an otherwise amorphous memory. Though presented in post-production digital format, the visual effects Tang employs are all analogue. ‘This is crucial to the art: the analogue world is being dissolved by digital media’, says Tang. ‘The analogue is the ruin, the memory that is being eroded, and yet [on] which I pin my hopes for resurrection or survival.’

Born in Hong Kong and relocating to Melbourne in 2003, Tang completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2004 and a Master of Fine Arts (Research) at Monash University in 2010. She has participated in several residency programs, including the Helsinki International Artist Programme (2013), The National Art Studio in South Korea (2012), Cité internationale des arts in Paris (2009) and the Banff Centre in Canada (2008). She has been the recipient of the Asialink Grant (2012), multiple Australia Council for the Arts grants (2011, 2009), the Georges Mora Fellowship (2008) and the NGV Trustee Award (2003). She has exhibited extensively in Australia and around the world.

Biography from NGV.