ben Tong

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My practice centers on oil painting and the ways matter, memory, light, and color interact on the surface of the canvas. I am drawn to oil paint for its particular capacities—its viscosity, translucency, and ability to accumulate complexity over time. This gradual ordering of material can resemble the emergence of consciousness from the disorder of the unconscious. Experiences and events leave impressions on the mind and body. Similarly, marks and chromatic pigments accumulate across the canvas, becoming the nerves of the picture plane. Through repetition, impulse, and reflection, these elements begin to acquire meaning without resolving into a single image or interpretation. I see painting as a way to express the complexity of embodied subjectivity. Rather than reducing experience to a fixed concept, a painting can hold multiple states at once, allowing representation, abstraction, memory, and materiality to coexist. My research takes place both through experimentation in the studio and through visceral encounters with the world. Sensations, remembered images, and subconscious experiences return to the canvas in translated and altered forms. The finished work remains a sensitive surface: an accumulation of time, perception, and physical experience.

Artwork