At one moment I couldn’t help but stare at Tanmu’s Dolly the sheep. Among her intricately executed work, neither the composition nor the technique of Dolly was particularly remarkable, except that unlike most others, it gazes back.

It was then that I started examining the affective and epistemic formations in Tanmu’s work; my insensitivity was not because I knew little about her practice—from painting and drawing to printmaking and multimedia installations—or artistic approach, but that I had always felt genuinely close to the images, despite their objective guise.