Tong Kunniao’s paintings are undergoing a transformation. Previously, his works predominantly adopted imagery from his installations, even employing their physical structures as a method of presenting his works on canvas. On the one hand, this approach created a striking absurdity and contrast by integrating works on canvas and three-dimensional installations, as well as juxtaposing traditional Chinese ink-wash techniques on silk with bizarre, viewer-facing installations. On the other hand, when kinetic installations became the frames for paintings, and tangible objects entered the two-dimensional canvas, the two creative threads of painting and installation art converged in Tong’s practice, sharing a consistent underlying logic.
Yet, in Tong Kunniao’s latest paintings, traces of his installations still inhabit the pictorial space. As seen in Untitled, however, they are driven - like a giant hammer embodying the artist’s subjectivity - behind the stage of this dazzling spectacle, striking downward as if in a game of whack-a-mole, penetrating the fibers of the silk ground of traditional Chinese painting. The humanoid forms of the installations thus merge with the verdant landscapes, mutually generating each other. This fusion gives faces to mountains, unsettling the serene scenes celebrated by literati and scholars under the gaze of the “eye of the other mountain.” The once tranquil, flowing energy of the landscape transforms into waves of stinging pain and spasms, like parasites long lived in the body suddenly stirred to life.
“Connection”
In this way, the juxtaposition of landscape and installation, of the non-human and the non-object, transforms Tong Kunniao’s “grafting” approach to painting into a form of “connection.” In his earlier works, it is evident that Tong prioritized his installations over paintings, maintaining a hierarchical relationship between the two media; in other words, his installations are seemingly “grafted onto,” or even “parasitic,” on the painted canvas. However, as Tong Kunniao continues to explore the path of painting, concurrent with his ongoing reflections on his installation practice, the shapes and forms of his installation began to internalize and be adopted into his painterly language.
In Tong Kunniao’s installation works, materials drawn from everyday life—found media, ready-made objects, even fragments of waste—are brought together through the operation of circuit-driven machinery to form heterogeneous connections. Diverse and disparate objects are often treated without distinction: within the inner workings of the machine and throughout an ongoing kinetic process, egalitarian relationships emerge between object and object, between the ready-made and the artwork. Similarly, the paintings that Tong Kunniao erects from his stacked installations can be construed as acquiring this connective logic through the mediation of the installations themselves. As his installation functions as a conduit, the brush and painting would command the same type of connection, transforming the act of painting into a machinic linkage. As installation shifts from being a subject of depiction to becoming a means of painting, as installation transitions from noun to verb, and as Tong Kunniao, the artist, switches from depicting installations to adopting the installational approach, painting becomes at once his own and achieves its self-realization.
“Connection,” as a mode of machinic operation, serves as the intrinsic grammar of Tong Kunniao’s installation art and structures the systematic logic of his artistic practice. This time, it leaps into the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, no longer satisfied with literal representation or merely reproducing the forms of installations. Instead, it unfolds into a self-reflexive exploration of both image and technique. In Eye of the Other Mountain, the ancient pictorial schema of blue-and-green landscape gazes upon itself within a distant, ethereal atmosphere; in Kindred Spirits, forms press close together, rubbing temples and cheeks, mutually absorbing one another—at once resembling a struggle over the same cup of milk tea and evoking the ever-renewing resonance of Eastern philosophy’s notion of ceaseless generation. Here, Tong Kunniao consciously sheds the visual shell of his installation, which has become familiar to the spectator, instead, immersing him in the depths of his painting and rendering landscapes. In Carving the Back of a Green Mountain, as he slowly implants the grotesque masks he created into the skin of the landscape, confronting them with the enduring tradition of Chinese ink-wash painting, the medium and brushes wielded by the artist—those technical means historically tied to tradition and pedagogy—are disrupted and reconfigured within the grammatical structure of installation, akin to an invasion by foreign species or contamination by bacterial proliferation. Thus, while employing traditional Chinese painting techniques, Tong Kunniao also adapted them. He irresponsibly disrupts the paradigms of gongbi precision and the convention of color application, moving from visual imagery to the technique of imagery, from the body of imagery to the imagery of the body. In addition, he crowns his understanding of Eastern aesthetics with what may be called “post-human,” a realm where machines and installations, emotions and bodies, are no longer exclusive privileges of humanity. In Tong Kunniao’s view, the unity between humans and the non-human, between objects and non-objects—the classical ideal of harmony between the celestial and humanity—has always existed within the intellectual lineage familiar to us. In this sense, the concept of the post-human is neither science fiction nor a fleeting trend; rather, we have obscured its contemporary relevance within this historical continuum through excessive aesthetic embellishment and culturally manufactured notions of refinement.
“Three Beds”
Within the spirit of Chinese landscape painting, contemporary artists have long strived to emulate the ancients in pursuit of the aesthetic ideal of “lying down and traveling” (woyou) – a contemplative journey undertaken through one’s imagination. In Tong Kunniao’s exhibition space, however, what provokes a moment of amused astonishment is that this illusory woyou materializes as actual beds, practically constituting a unique mode of viewing his paintings. We encounter three beds, each assuming a different form. In Dream Raising from Old Tree Roots, a single bed adorned with a security guard’s helmet appears as an installation work, undergoing a transformation from a ready-made object to an artwork. In The Sun Rises Anew, Tong Kunniao not only parodies the famous The Skeleton Fantasy Show but also merges the physical bed with painted imagery to create a “painting-installation.” Finally, in Cat and Rabbit Embracing, a cheap folding bed literally replaces the elegant mounting of a traditional hanging scroll, its metallic texture enveloping the refined paper. That is, the bed as installation here chooses to rely on and become an object, a support and display for the painting, allowing the physicality of the installation to recede into the background, thereby revealing the presence of painting as itself.
This inevitably brings to mind Plato’s ancient theory of the bed as imitation or the conceptual art practices represented by Joseph Kosuth. In classical aesthetic doctrines, the ideal “bed” as truth determines the form of the physical “bed,” while the artistic representation of a bed is but a copy of a copy, far removed from the supreme ideal. Arguably, the evolution of art after the classical era and the shifting paradigms of modern and contemporary art have sought to overturn such “Platonism,” subverting the tyrannical demands of a priori presuppositions on artistic creation, and emphasizing the specific, microcosmic, experiential, and bodily aspects of the artistic endeavor. Before Tong Kunniao’s iteration of the bed, a series of bold experiments centered around beds have been created in modern and contemporary art history, by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas. Through the motif of beds, the interconnection of paint and bedding, painterly techniques, and everyday life, the boundaries between artworks once emblematic of elite culture and the mundane reality we inhabit were gradually erased. It is precisely through the connection of art and life, the hybridization of technique and ready-mades, media and trash, that contemporary art expands at the historical frontiers. In this sense, Tong Kunniao situates himself within this contextual lineage, continuing and extending its trajectory. Thus, Tong Kunniao’s beds skirt all lofty ideals traditionally associated with art, placing the real bed, the bed as installation, and the pictorial image on equal terms. Together they produce a polyphonic clamor, crowding and flickering within a space reminiscent of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” where multiple realities shimmer in uneven alignment.
Moreover, the floor of the space housing these installations and paintings is strewn with withered autumn leaves, sourced from Tong Kunniao’s studio in Beijing—unattended debris from the courtyard. Tong transports this trash, along with his paintings and installations composed of such discarded material, to the exhibition site. If, on the gallery space, we are presented with the equal treatment of painting and installation, the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries and the stripping away of hierarchical order—then once these works turn toward the viewer, once they gaze back at those who approach them, the experience shifts—The rustling leaves, carrying their own persistent sound, appear simultaneously and envelop our bodies. The viewer’s eyes and ears—indeed, multiple senses including vision, hearing, and touch—are drawn into a simultaneous convergence, forming what might be called a body without organs. That is, the grammatical connection between painting and installation, within a space of display and reception, immediately extends to bodily sensations. Painting, traditionally serving vision, intersects with the tactile impulse of installation; the eye that contemplates images becomes buried within layers of noise. Before such works, the aesthetic synesthesia we might expect gives way instead to a disoriented network of wandering nerves. Logic and cognition, once occupying positions of priority, descend back to the chaotic ground. In this reversal of the positions of body and gaze—within a vision that approaches tactility—painting may still be appreciated with elegance, yet it simultaneously provokes corporeal reactions, stirring the body itself, even awakening visceral movements within the gut.
“The Painting Machine”
Finally, from these silk-ground, color paintings titled as tu (“diagrams” or “charts”), one grapples with Tong Kunniao’s persistent engagement with tradition through the normative format. We have also observed the strange compositional structures of these works: in pieces such as Tortoise and Snake in Parallel, pictorial imagery, provoked by the anti-aesthetic qualities of installation, evokes a posthuman sensibility within Eastern aesthetics. At the same time, the flat application of color and the background arrangement reminiscent of cell division push this artificial aesthetic onto the painted surface. These images continually advance toward the viewer, confronting us with an unavoidable presence. Meanwhile, Tong Kunniao’s body, the artist’s labor in painting, along with his works, involuntarily invents tradition, challenges conventions, and generates new modes of viral transmission and new ways of seeing.
Between “tu” (the image) and “gou” (pictorial structure) – the composites for “composition”, as mentioned previously, what generates these painted images and their architectures is the “illogical logic” inherent in Tong Kunniao’s installation art. Tong embeds structured rhythms and reverberations of machine operation within these flat images, transforming these “tu” from traditional narrative modes - from images that convey allegory or landscapes resonate with emotions - into an open framework charged with unknown possibilities. Such a mode of thinking is grounded in “gou”, shaped by the logic of installation. Through this “connection” method induced by installations that painting returns to itself, freed from being merely a tool for depicting the world or confined by technical means. Painting restores the body’s vivid sensations and latent potentials; the act of painting is assembled into a mechanism of production and a machine of thought.
Thus, the exhibition of new works is not merely a periodic summary but an internal turning point in the artist’s personal trajectory. Between traditional pictorial rhetoric and painting techniques, between three-dimensional installations and two-dimensional canvases, Tong Kunniao constructs a “painting machine” where Eastern spirit and the post-human unexpectedly converge. This systematic machine grammar generates both allegory and thought. Within the machine’s operational mechanism, painted images bid farewell to the constraints of representation, escaping along generative lines. When Tong Kunniao operates or steers this machine, the audience sitting in the passenger seat participates and observes, while becoming both the spectator and the spectacle. Invited by the artist, they are drawn conspiratorially into this serious game, collectively entangled in its unfolding.
In Tong Kunniao’s recent works, the connective logic of installations has become the grammar of painting. This grammatical structure not only merges the two forms of installation and painting but also employs installation as a method to transform painterly techniques. It’s fair to claim that while Tong Kunniao paints in a machine-like manner, he also simultaneously engages in self-experimentation encompassing installation art and performance within his creative process. Following his machine-centric creations and after depicting these machines using traditional Chinese painting techniques, we witness the incessant connections and roaring of the installation machines transforming into a new language through which the subject may speak. When such painting continues to operate in a machine-like manner, engaging in the production of imagery, the diagrammatic act of the “painting machine” also generates, at the level of thought and method, a veritable “painting-machine.”
