Stargazing
Introduction by Lee Ambrozy
On February 15, 2022, the night of the Lantern Festival, Star Gallery Beijing will present Tong Tianqing’s most monumental exhibition to date, "Stargazing." In these mural-like works, Tong mines the dichotomies of timelessness and specificity, us and them, material fragility and timeless allegories to bring us a celebration of everyday people, their rituals, and spectatorship. Here, in a straightforward style and installed with innovative minimalist mounting, Tong presents ten new works over two series. The large-format ink on rice paper works are hung directly on the wall, enhancing the tomb like atmosphere within the exhibition hall. Their unusual subjects—dogfights at the Yangzhen market bazaar and the afterlife of human remains—are vignettes taken from his magnum opus artist book, Sea of Bitterness, folios of which are on display in the adjoining room. In addition, Tong celebrates the Year of the Tiger with a series of handcrafted, painted lanterns, and a seasonal painting in the gallery’s foyer.
His third exhibition with the gallery, “Stargazing” is the next iteration of the text-and-image based ink practices Tong deftly explored in previous exhibitions "Rid of Horror” (2017) and “Brine: An Artist Book by Tong Tianqing” (2015). His new works bring us into the quotidian everyday lives he documents in his practice.
Tong Tianqing is well known for his calligraphic practice and his journals documenting travels, observations, and experiences in and around Beijing. Devoting himself to demonstrating the relevance of traditional ink-based arts in modern China and contemporizing ink figure painting, he uses a style legible to a broad audience that encompasses both academy elite and those people whose lives he chronicles. Tong draws on the legacies of Bada Shanren, Qi Baishi, Feng Zikai, and even Song monumental landscapists such as Fan Kuan in depicting a spectrum of characters from mythological figures to peasants. His unembellished brushwork and compositions reflect pictorial traditions of folk art, literati painting, and Socialist Realism. Here, he merges his craft with the scale, monumentality, and immersive qualities of mural painting.
The exhibition centers on a cycle of paintings depicting greyhounds chasing and devouring rabbits alongside the human perpetrators and spectators of this gruesome ritual. At 2.4 x 3.1 meters, the larger-than-life figures surround the light-flooded gallery with its saw-tooth, Bauhaus-style windows. The series’ ambitious attempt at scale is enabled by advancements in rice paper manufacture, which allows for single sheets of paper of unprecedented proportions. In an adjacent room, three paintings of equal scale document contemporary crematorium practices, an inevitable postmortem reality for every body living and dying in China.
Tong Tianqing's application of color is considered, layered, and reserved. After translation into ink lines and mineral pigments, the harshness of his subject matter feels mitigated by his uncomplicated style. However, the reductive qualities of his brushwork do not diminish his paintings’ impact. We become lost in the textures of the dogs' lithe frames, the saturation of red "blood" spots, and the wrinkled brown pants of the spectators. Using the power of minimalist lines, meditative repetition, and subdued wintry hues, Tong weaves fascinating visual and psychological complexity into the surfaces of his artworks.
The addition of native plant species and animals to his works add spatial depth and site-specificity that native Beijingers will appreciate. The schematic facial features and the bird and flower elements in his compositions recall religious painting or sacred geometries as well as overlap with centuries old traditions of craftsman painters. Suspended between Tong's decorative surfaces and the psychic depths of their worlds are scenes that deliver both ruthlessness and the picturesque.
The struggle is in reconciling these cruel subjects as art world narratives. By presenting them as aestheticized subjects, Tong Tianqing makes ink practice contemporary; through this culturally specific medium and its embedded histories, he translates the energetic rush of spectatorship from the Yangzhen market bazaar into the art gallery, where it feels out of place. In doing so he reminds us that we are no different than the crowds on these walls.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
A specialist in Chinese art from the ninth through eleventh centuries, Lee Ambrozy is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where her research examines how images from nature circulated within early urban China’s art and material culture. She has more than fifteen years of expertise working with contemporary art within China, and obtained her M.A. at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts with a thesis discussing the nationalist uses of traditional ink painting under Mao. She was editor and translator of Ai Weiwei's Blog (MIT Press, 2011) and editor of the first publication of seminal modern art texts in Chinese, Inside the White Cube: Artforum Fifty years of Art Criticism (Sanlian Books, 2017). She is currently based in Detroit, where she writes, curates exhibitions, and translates on occasion, adapting to the changing cultural landscape in the Post-Pandemic world.
