Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems

INKstudio is proud to present "Iconology of Life," the first solo exhibition for the Guangdong-born visual artist Lao Tongli (b. 1982). 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 3^rd 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 millennia. 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 thangka 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 Tongli starts with a simple philosophical premise that universal or trans-cultural human meaning emerges first as personal, subjective experience. Although a topic of only secondary concern in Western thought, subjective experience is the starting point for much of Chinese and East Asian art and philosophy. Unlike thinkers in the post-Socratic West who have invested in a world-view based on objects and categories expressed through concepts and logic, Chinese and East Asian thinkers, as early as the Zhou Dynasty in classical texts such as the Yi Jing or "Book of Changes" have instead used xiang or "images" to metaphorically refer to yi or "subjective experiences" residing in the xin or "heart-mind."

Using this subjective-poetic mode of thinking, Lao Tongli over the past decade has 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 such as Laozi and Zhuangzi and Song Neo-Confucians such as Zhang Zai, Zhou Dunyi and Zhu Xi with modern, international thinkers such as biologist-turned-sinologist Joseph Needham, post-structuralist-turned-new-materialist Gilles Deleuze and particle-physicist-turned-eco-philosopher Fritjof Capra. In the three series The Desire of Libido series (2013-2018), Above the Horizon · Sky (2018-present), and Self and the Others (2021-present), Lao Tongli develops the yixiang or "idea-images" of Heart, Forest, Sky and Self-Others and explores their interconnected relationships.

Xin: Heart

In his The Desire of Libido series, Lao Tongli deptics a vast network of branching and inter-connected blood vessels in a dazzling array of chromatic hues. As doctors cared for his father who was ailing from heart disease, Lao Tongli poured over radiological images of his father's heart and started painting these works as a meditation on his father's illness and a means of mourning his subsequent passing. Blood is the carrier of our qi or "life energy" and blood vessels the branching pathways that transport this life energy to every corner of our mind-body. In Chinese philosophy, the xin or "heart-mind" is the seat of all subjective experience including our embodied thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions, imagination, and memories. The Desire of Libido is thus the universal impulse that drives not only the creation and proliferation of organic life but the emergence of each individual organism's  consciousness and will to live.

Lin: Trees

Over time, Lao Tongli’s networks of blood vessels began to take the form of trees. Lao Tongli’s tree forms stem from his memories of the enormous Banyan or Ficus microcarpa trees that grew up and around the rural village of his childhood. Banyan tree holds religious and spiritual significance across Asian cultures. In Buddhism, Ficus religiosa is also known as the “Bodhi Tree” because Sakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment beneath one such tree in 6th Century B.C.. Ficus benghalensis is the species of Banyan tree under which Krishna delivered his sermon in the Bhagavad Gita. In Southern China, Ficus macrocarpa, or Chinese Banyan, are worshipped by rural villagers as local spirits or gods that brings good fortune, longevity and enlightenment. As each branch forks into smaller branches and smaller branches fork into twigs, the trees—each distinctly rendered in its own vibrant hue—weave themselves into a dense network. Lao Tongli’s branches terminate in a point but each of these tips then touches the tips of its neighboring tree. In this way, all of Lao Tongli’s trees are connected into something larger—a super-organism, a community, a society or an entire eco-system. This ecological or organismic view of reality is what the great twentieth-century sinologist Joseph Needham described as the “organic naturalism” or “organicism” of the traditional Chinese world-view.

Tian: Sky or Nature 

In the series Above the Horizon · Sky (2018-present), Lao Tongli recalls growing up as a child in the open expanse of the rural countryside. For him, the image of the sky evokes a sense of the vast openness of nature and looking up at the sky, a sense of hope and possibility. In some works, he depicts the sky as seen from below through the tangled branches of the pippala trees of his village. In others, he shifts perspective to one above the trees and amongst the clouds. In classical Chinese philosophy, tian or "the sky" represents the natural order of the cosmos and encompasses not only the movement of the sun, the moon and the stars but the cycles of the day and the seasons, changes in the weather and climate and the flow of water and qi through the landscape. The sky, thus, embodies the inorganic source of life's energy and its pulsing, dynamic flow through the living systems of the natural world.

Ren: Self and Others

In the most recent series Self and the Others (2021-present), Lao Tongli extends his lexicon of images to include the human body-our "self"-in relation to a larger ecosystem of "other" living organisms of which we are just a part. Compared to The Desire of Libido series which imagines the embodied experiences of the subjective "heart-mind", Lao Tongli's image of the human form in Self and the Others refers to humanity and its relationship to the world in the abstract. Using the same branching structures to describe both the human body and the larger world or ecosystem of which humanity is an inseparable part invokes the deep and unbreakable bond between humans and the natural world-the holistic Chinese idea of tian ren he yi, that "humanity and nature are one."  Qi"vital energy" flowing from tian or the "sky" or "cosmos" circulates through lin "forests" or "ecosystems" that encompass both ren "humanity" as a whole and xin our subjective "conscious experience" as individuals.

Asia Polychrome Painting

"Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems" follows "Kang Chunhui: Observing My Distant Self" as the second in a series of curatorial projects focused on the early trans-national, heavy-polychrome narrative painting pictorial language that spread from India to Central Asia, Southeast Asia, China, Korean and Japan with the dissemination of Buddhism and later returned to Central Asia, Persia and the Middle East in the form of the Persian, Moghul and Ottoman miniature. This visual art has taken modern and contemporary form through the art reforms of Meiji-era Japan—the Nihonga Superflat movement led by contemporary Nihonga-trained artists such as Takashi Murakami (b. 1962, Tokyo) —through the postcolonial, post-modern revival of the Persian/South Asian miniature by contemporary South Asian artists such as Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969, Lahore) and Imran Qureshi (b. 1972, Hyderabad), through the post Reform and Opening-Up revival of imperial court painting by artists such as Xu Lei (b. 1962, Nantong) and Hao Liang (b. 1983, Chengdu) and through the contemporary thangka-inspired paintings of Tibetan artists such as Tenzing Rigdol (b. 1982, Kathmandu) and Gonkar Gyatso (b. 1961, Lhasa).