In a Year of 13 Moons | On Some Recent Paintings by Ben Tong

2023 will be a year of thirteen moons. Borrowing its title from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 film – which itself makes reference to an alleged astrological phenomenon that casts dark shadows and creates existential difficulties, particularly for those of a melancholic disposition – this exhibition showcases a particular tonal register that Ben Tong has been mining over the past year in his Los Angeles studio. The resulting paintings, despite their somber mood, glow with a hallucinatory intensity, creating a resonant disparity that seems to draw us in while simultaneously expanding the space that surrounds us. Whereas some paintings seem to whisper or scream their message out at us, if Tong’s paintings were to have a sound, it would be a meditative hum: one that beckons us inside, while at the same time refusing to seduce us with any overt clarity. We can hear that hum and feel it in a painting like Evening’s Revelation, an interior with floral arrangement in the lower foreground, with a symphonic rise cascading in the pink, peach, and fleshlike streetlights calling out through the windows forming the upper half of the canvas. It is within this ambivalence, this ambiguity, wherein the works’ sophistication announces itself. The blurred image is predominant, as in It Was Evening All Day, a symphonic conspiracy between the floral, the architectural, and the luminous. Tong’s blurs give us the Real, but replicate the experience of viewing it through dream or memory, the processes of which inevitably distort their object into a drunken haze colored by the emotions of the aftermath, of the distance that is required to experience the initial event anew in its transformed state. We might even go so far as to say that distance – in both a physical and metaphysical sense – is the artist’s grand overarching subject.

A deeply processual painter, Tong allows paint to do its own thing – the fluidity of his approach manifesting quite literally in the thin washes applied to the canvas. But in his conception of the act of creation, the artist’s role is to open the door to chaos and find out what transpires through that action. In order to heighten the risk, Tong will often forgo the use of brushes, applying paint with rags as well as more idiosyncratic instruments such as a massage gun. Tong understands the hidden wisdom concealed within his chosen medium of oil and canvas, its limitless array of tonal and emotive conveyances; painting, when guided by such a perceptive spirit, emerges as its own form of knowledge, wholly autonomous and yet endlessly malleable. Through such a freeing, yet simultaneous rigorous engagement with process, the works come to attain a nuanced constellation of forms and moods, from the dark introspection of S. to the otherworldly ecstasies of Dog Star. Ultimately, the paintings comprising “In a Year of 13 Moons” offer us a re-writing of the cosmos, showing us not just the desolation, but the promises offered by the state of melancholia: of reflection, renewal, and re-invention.

– Travis Jeppesen

Ben Tong (b. 1981 Toronto, Canada) is an artist based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Art Basel Film program, Hong Kong; Europa NYC, New York; Island, New York. 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.