Tong Zheng – Between Breaths

Description

Artist Statement

My work explores the dialogue between Chinese ink traditions and Western oil painting, focusing on memory, presence, and disappearance. Rather than beginning with a fixed narrative, I build images through layers, allowing figures and forms to emerge, dissolve, and return in altered ways. Although I work primarily in oil, my approach is shaped by the language of ink and my long-term practice of Tai Chi-emptiness, breath, rhythm, movement, and stillness. I am interested in the tension between figure and space, density and transparency, presence and absence. Instead of resolving these opposites, I allow them to coexist, creating paintings in which an image may appear clearly for a moment and then begin to slip away. I am currently an MFA candidate in Painting at Laguna College of Art + Design (LCAD), continuing to develop a visual language that brings Eastern
aesthetics into contemporary painting.