About

Ruotai Tang (b. 2002, Zhengzhou, China) is an artist based in New York. He received his BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 2025.
His practice centers on natural materials and light, working with branches, stones, soil, and wood to examine how structures behave when removed from the environments they belong to. By extracting these materials from their original ecological and functional systems, Tang places them in a suspended state—stripped of use, support, and context. In this condition, their weight, fragility, fractures, angles, and instability become exposed, forming temporary structures that hover between construction and looseness.

Light plays an equally significant role in his work. The shifting movement of light and shadow reveals subtle changes along the edges, cuts, and uneven surfaces of the materials, causing the structure to appear differently across time. Whether through the physical presence of natural materials or the transient forms created by light, Tang’s work investigates how structures become exposed, disordered, displaced, and re-seen within environments to which they do not naturally belong.