While studying computer science at The University of Toronto my curiosity took me outside my initial area of study. I enrolled in a black and white photography class, philosophy, semiotics, and visual studies. Moreover, it was something that awakened a deep interest in me. I found I had an energy that drove a kind of search to come closer to this mysterious thing called art.
To what extent (if any) your previous experience in photography effects your current work on the canvas?
Photography and photographic images have become an extension of human vision. It extends and amplifies a register of seeing in the world. Perception, memory, an infinite archive come into play upon the present moment of looking at a surface. I think that photographic mode has impressed upon our very intimate way of looking. When I’m working in the specific medium of oil paint it has this very interesting capacity for taking on projections, feelings, nuances of internal and psychic states. As I work on applying marks and layers of paint - opaque and translucent - forms begin to suggest themselves and emerge. Whether from the paint itself or from my imagination. The photographic image has undoubtedly impressed parts of my own unconscious.
Your art often represents light sources, both natural (e.g. sun) and artificial (like chandelier). Does light acts as an independent protagonist of your work or is it rather an embodiment of some concept? For centuries light has been used as a metaphor to refer to consciousness, for instance.
No, I don’t see my work as representing any concepts. The light happens. Inside the specific medium of oil paint, particles of light bend and refract. The modulation of lights and dark gets interpreted in our brain and we perceive both in an instant. What I’m after is something closer to sudden awareness and presence.
Your paintings almost radiate from within; at the same time quite often, you mix these glowing luminous colors with much more darker shades and tints. How do you explain this ambivalent mood that your color palette creates?
As the amplitude of light falls off into darkness and back up we get a kind of wave. Lightness and darkness exist on various parts of a curve, and are essentially connected. The ambivalent mood you mention is this paradox.
© Ben Tong and Maggie in front of Last Night's Repetition (2024, Oil on canvas, 76 × 66 in; 193 × 167.6 cm), Courtesy of the Artist. Image: Dawn Blackman
Apart from light, another key topic of your art is time, which operates as both subject and object in your works. Why are you so captivated with this topic and what does the concept of time means to you in the first place?
Time can be simply the awareness of change. And from the perspective of this as experienced from a mind inside a body, this can be elastic. I’ve always wondered why time passed by so slowly as a child. Sometimes when I’m immersed in a painting I feel as though I’ve been working on it for an hour, when only ten minutes has a passed. The more I dial in to the newness of each moment the more dilated time becomes. It is as though the mind has this capacity to expand and contract time itself.
In one of your interviews, I’ve read that painting is nothing less than a connection between the experience on earth to the stuff on the cosmos. Could you please comment on this?
I don’t remember saying that. But I connect with this statement. I feel it as true in some non empirical sense. There’s a sense of deep time, perhaps as our unconscious, or more primal brain, is activated in our sensations of a painting, activated by this very earthly material of minerals, pigment, oil. So there’s the communion with all kinds of stuff, inside ourselves, and outside ourselves, and linked to time and space near and very far.
I particularly like the expanding of the space that you managed to achieve in your works. Is it only a physical expansion, or you rather try to push the boundaries of the space-time dimension?
Space and time are folded into each other. And so to push on the physical and material is to expand the space-time dimension. And there’s not only one space-time dimension, but n space-time dimensions. The philosopher Henry Bergson has this model where, picture this, there are two cones, one an inversion from the other, and their apex meets on a flat plane where the tips touch. One cone represents the field of all possibilities in future (in the world) and the other the past (as our memory). The meeting point is the present perception where the expanded possibilities (near the base of the cones) of the virtual past and the future has travelled up to manifest as in the present moment. There’s this continual loop happening where the present perception is being projected upon by a past memory and the expanded field of possibilities contracts to meet this point. There’s a relation here that is very close to the act of painting. Many possibilities meet in a gesture or decision on the canvas. And while this one moment emerges from all possibilities it connects us all back to this field of possibility.
To apply paint upon the canvas you often forgo the use of brushes and utilize unconventional tools, ranging from rags to a massage gun. How did you come up with this technic and what does it allow you to transmit to the viewer?
It’s all from a kind of experimentation, and from this open ended material play a language of painting emerges. I think all these tools I’ve been employing for painting allow for this kind of rhythm, this on and off, a kind of frequency to be seen, and this kind of ambivalent mood you mentioned earlier. I think an engagement, and more appropriately, this kind of play with no specific outcome in mind with material, allows for certain reflections or thought to then emerge from something outside myself. Consciousness is a frequency. A frequency exists on a specific part of a waveform. If we tune into, or zoom into, specific parts of this waveform there’s this on and off, or switching. What we perceive as a continuous sound can be a stutter. What I’d like to transmit is this kind of expansion and contraction, through the immediacy of perception.
Are there any artists who have influenced the development of your art? Where do you generally find inspiration sources while creating new works?
I think influence happens in this very non-linear way, and also unconsciously. Visually, everything goes in. Earlier on I did a kind of residency with the artist Trisha Donnelly in Berlin. She introduced us to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and took us to the Pergamon Museum. There I encountered this tiny stone tablet that was at least 7 thousand years old, and the impressions its maker made in it felt like they were traveling through time and touching my eye. Hearing Francis season talk about painting is illuminating. He talks about wanting a painting to “hit you directly on the nervous system!” Being in situations that allow my mind to wander also provides tremendous resource. I love being in Las Vegas casino hotel. Everything is designed to make you lose yourself. Here, the eye is constantly bombarded by visuals, to the point of it almost being in a kind of meditative state. I also love playing tennis. There’s something very similar to my process of painting in that the best tennis is played when there’s a kind of synchronicity between what is in your control and what is not. There are probably a million factors that go into the trajectory of a ball that is coming towards you, and then you must stay in the present moment and react to it. I live on the perimeter of a canyon in Los Angeles. It’s a 100 year old hunting cabin surrounded by trees. At night packs of coyotes howl and it sounds like there are hundreds of them communicating in the darkness. Also, I’ve been listening to Billie Eilish a lot while painting.
You’ve completed an art residency in Villa Aurora in Berlin. Could you please share with us your impressions of the residency, as well as of the city itself?
I just love the city! There’s this presence of this human history - a lot of spirits. The residency that season was in this old building that was in this semi-ruined state - really beautiful.
Your art practice combines painting, photography, video.... How do you see your practice evolving in the future?
I’m in love with the process of oil painting. It’s such a mysterious thing, how an image emerges from minerals, pigments, and oils. I’ve been in this painting reading group that has met each week almost since the beginning of the pandemic. Though the readings started as being mostly about painters and painting it has covered a lot of other ground, including media theory, postmodernism, A.I., to aesthetic theory. Currently, the reading group’s founding members, Anna Elise Johnson, Jason Burgess - who are also fantastic painters - and I, are coming up with a publication that will somehow knit all these thoughts and narratives together. And it will all take the form of an experimental play! I think painting has the capacity to fold all these things into it, and I’m excited to continue to experiment, play, and develop new images.
