This summer, Taipa Village Cultural Association proudly presents local accomplished artist Tong Chong’s wooden sculpture exhibition “Restless Nature” which is first unveiled to the public, showcasing Tong Chong’s new collection with plywood technique and reflects the outcome of his 3 years’ meticulous research on this subject.

                                           “Feel the Temperature of the Wood”      Tong Chong    

Curator’s Statement

Tong Chong is an accomplished artist, best known for his paintings of an unmistakably naïve style, marked by an economy of means (charcoal on raw canvas), and wooden sculptures depicting fictional creatures and other figurative forms derived from natural wood block.

This Exhibition presents Tong Chong’s latest body of work focused mainly on sculpture. It is, in fact, the culmination of a 3-year study on the subject of sculpting with plywood, which enabled him to obtain a Master’s Degree from The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts this past June.

In this new series of sculptures, each piece took at least 4 to 6 months to finish due to gluing procedures, whilst the sculpting itself is a process which requires physical and psychological stamina that cannot be taken lightly. This tells us about Chong’s character, as it is embodied in each piece: the perseverance to achieve his goals and a restless soul eager to evolve and perfect his technical skills.

The nature of sculpture enacts a haptic relationship with the observer. However, what is experienced in this new series, besides the obvious contours differentiating the foreground and the background, is a cognitive exaltation: the clear emergence of the negative space, i.e. the spaces in-between the schooling in “Fishes”, the carved space in “Cloud” and the intertwined space of the endless line in “Circular”. The suggestion of movement is manifested by the sculptures’ missing parts, forcing the human eye to attempt to fill the void, thus creating a psychological restlessness in the act of perception.

Depicting the concept of movement in the subjects seems to imply the acceptance of change in oneself. We are witnessing the mark of a new beginning…

João Ó

About Tong Chong

Tong Chong was born in 1977 in Fuzhou and moved to Macau in 1984.  In 1990, he studied Painting in the Fuzhou Arts and Crafts School and, between 1991-1997, studied Modern Art in the Visual Arts Institute Macao. He graduated from the Macao Polytechnic Institute in 2006. To date, Tong has participated in over 100 international group exhibitions and 8 solo exhibitions.

Tong Chong’s works have been exhibited and displayed in Spain, Portugal, the United States, Holland, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and more than 19 provinces and districts in Mainland China. His works have been collected by Museums, Fund Associations and for private possession.

Over the years, paintings and sculptures have become the main media of his artwork production. His works strongly reflect and explore modern social culture and the living ways of human beings, emphasising on the return to nature of humanity and orientating the role, as well as demonstrating human behaviour in modern society.