Ben Tong

In Ten Thousand Crystals, Ben Tong pulls us into his world rendered in brilliant jewel tones. Nightscapes and still lifes vibrate with color and energy invisible to the naked eye. Gestural streaks and dabbles of paint dance around the canvas like beams of light in the midst of refracting and reflecting. As if looking through a stained glass window, the paintings appear illuminated, and familiar forms abstract into glimmering fragments.

When describing space in a two-dimensional medium, some artists choose to focus on form, while others meditate on line or color. For Tong, light is both the subject and vehicle by which his compositions are rendered. Light moves through layers of oil and pigment, diffracting off minerals and then directing into the eyes. This schema of light renders images in multiple dimensions of space (matter) and time (memory).

Recalling the work of Impressionist painters, Monet in particular, Tong captures life in motion, shifting light and shadow both defining and obscuring each scene. While overwhelmingly painterly, the 21st century eye can’t help but perceive a photographic and digital quality to Tong’s work, a blurred edge reading like a focal plane or repetitive marks as a pixelated image.

Tong’s paintings occupy the liminal space between abstraction and representation, dream and reality. The artist recalls one of his earliest memories of looking at the world through a red ornament, the crimson orb reflecting back a miniaturized and pearlescent version of life. His paintings possess the same hazy, fleeting quality of a memory. Like attempting to recall the details of a dream before it slips out of consciousness – certainty falling away and imagery further distorting, only to spontaneously arise again in an ephemeral moment.

Ben Tong (b. 1981 Toronto, Canada) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. His work has been exhibited internationally at Jack Barrett, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; University of California, Santa Barbara; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Art Basel Film program, Hong Kong. He was a fellow at the Villa Aurora Foundation, Berlin, and in residency at the Soma Summer Program, Mexico City. Tong received a BCS in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, a BFA in Photo from CalArts, and an MFA in Art from CalArts.