"Soft. Hard. Absorbing. Changing. Setting. Words that contradict each other, all true of the same material at once." London. umum+ studio presents Lacquer Before Lacquer, the first solo exhibition of London-based sculptor and painter Miao Tan, at Koppel Collective from 4–6 September 2026. Miao Tan's practice began with a question many artists working in identity politics would recognise: could the slow, irreversible hardening nature of lacquer stand in for the way society hardens fluid identities into fixed roles? Drawing on Judith Butler's writing on gender performativity to freeze the everyday act of "wearing an identity" mid-motion, Tan’s earliest lacquer works — a tower of lacquer-coated hats and a row of stiffened stockings holding themselves upright with no structure inside them — address this question directly. Lacquer Before Lacquer traces a new chapter of her relationship with lacquer. As Tan kept working the material, pouring it into fabric and watching it seep, resist, and set, she found herself less interested in what lacquer could represent than in what it was actually doing: fibre changing at first contact, each new layer altering weight, colour, and rigidity in a transformation with no way back. The metaphor she started with gave way to something closer to observation. Gender receded, and the discipline of layering itself came forward. Her sculptures moved from readymade objects carrying a fixed reading toward freeform, textile vessels. To sculptural brushes made from horsehair and thread, demonstrating objects with no stable centre of gravity, built to be discovered rather than decoded. 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." Rather than offering visitors a history of East Asian lacquer craft, Lacquer Before Lacquer stays as Tan’s first-person experience of the material, sensory, physical, and unresolved, as the show's true starting point. Instead of beginning with the long history of lacquer traditions, this exhibition begins with a moment before any tradition had taken shape, when the material was still uncertain, experimental, and full of possibility. The exhibition closes with an invitation rather than a conclusion. A selection of Tan’s smaller sculptural 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. Alongside them hangs a painting made with these brushes, none created with a specific function in mind. It leaves us wondering: does functionality live inside a tool, or is it negotiated between the tool's form and the body that adapts to it? "What I love about lacquer was never the repetition of applying it," Tan says. "It's what happens after: a transformation I can't control, that leaves me hopeful, uneasy, doubtful, and thrilled all in the same breath. That unpredictability belongs to the material, not to me." Curator's note, umum+ studio: "We didn't want to introduce lacquer to a UK audience as a craft tradition with a glossary attached. We wanted to show how the artist encounters it, argues with it, and is changed by it, and let the audience meet the material the way she did, without being told what to think of it first."