Born in 1981 in Toronto, Canada, and now based in Los Angeles, artist Ben Tong has worked with an array of media, from video to installation, and painting. His oil paintings on canvas move beyond traditional representation, mining the fertile ground between a moment and its later re-remembrance. The objects in the compositions, in sumptuous colors ranging from deep violets to apricot, feel like approximations drawn from a dream-like state. Tong often foregoes a brush in favor of rags and a massage gun, bruising the color onto the painting’s surface, sometimes rendering dappled semblances of a still-life. Here, Tong freezes memory on the brink of vanishing and edges closer to a monument of the in-betweens of daily life.

Ben Tong (b. 1981 Toronto, Canada) is an artist based in Los Angeles, California. 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 BSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, a BFA in Photo from CalArts, and an MFA in Art from CalArts.