Installation view, Iconology of Life, First Floor / Exhibition Hall No.2, INKstudio

Iconology of Life
Closing Sunday, December 1, 2024
Red No. 1-B1, Caochangdi, Beijing

These are the last weeks to view Iconology of Life, the first solo exhibition for the Guangdong-born visual artist Lao Tongli (b. 1982) at INKstudio. Lao Tongli is a contemporary artist working in the early gongbi or “meticulous brush” mode of painting—a tradition which can trace its roots to Imperial painting of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and religious mural painting dating as far back as the the Six Dynasties period (220-589). Unlike China’s literati painting tradition which emphasized landscape painting in ink monochrome, gongbi painting often depicted moral, spiritual and religious narratives using vibrant mineral pigments such as azurite, malachite, lapis lazuli, lead, cobalt and cinnabar. Having entered China as early as the 3rd century along the Silk Road from Central Asia, gongbi painting facilitated cross-cultural artistic exchange between China, Central Asia, the Middle East, East Asia and Europe over the ensuing millenia. As a result, gongbi painting shares many of the same materials and techniques found in European fresco painting, Persian or South Asian miniature painting, Tibetan thanka painting, and Japanese Nihonga painting.

Having mastered gongbi painting materials and methods at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Lao Tongli spent two years, following his graduation in 2006, working in France and Germany for international contemporary artist Yang Jiechang, himself a master of gongbi painting technique. There he developed a novel approach to gongbi painting that reformulates both the technique and the visual semiotics of this early transnational art form for use in our international, contemporary art discourse today.

In expanding the visual semiotics of gongbi painting, Lao starts with a simple philosophical premise that universal or trans-cultural human meaning emerges first as personal, subjective experience. Using this mode of thinking, he has over the past decade been systematically building a lexicon of images or xiang to resurrect the natural and organic world view of living systems that connects the early Taoists and Song Neo-Confucians with modern, international thinkers. This exhibition features three series—The Desire of Libido (2013–2018), Above the Horizon · Sky (2018–present), and Self and the Others (2021–present)—in which Lao develops the yixiang or ‘idea-images’ of Heart, Forest, Sky, and Self-Others, exploring their interconnected relationships.

To view these works and more, click here.