Hong Kong | Lao Tongli: The Living Field

The Living Field, a solo exhibition by contemporary artist Lao Tongli, will be presented at INKstudio, Hong Kong, beginning July 2, 2026. It is the third exhibition presented since the opening of INKstudio’s Hong Kong space, as well as Lao Tongli’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. As Lao’s latest exhibition at INKstudio following his 2024 solo exhibition Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems at INKstudio, Beijing, this exhibition takes his long-developed practice of gongbi heavy-color painting as its thread and presents his sustained exploration of the body, nature, memory, and living systems.

The exhibition focuses on key trajectories in Lao Tongli’s practice since 2013, including Desire of Libido, Above the Horizon · Sky, Self and Other, and the recent In and Out of the Clouds. Blood vessels, branches, tree canopies, skies, human bodies, and cloud forms interpenetrate and generate one another across his paintings, forming a lexicon of images organized around heart, forest, sky, and the human, and opening onto reflections on vital circulation, familial memory, ecological relation, and cosmic order.

The Living Field refers both to a field in which life circulates and grows among land, climate, body, and memory, and to Lao Tongli’s reactivation of gongbi heavy-color painting in a contemporary context. The volcanic geology, subtropical monsoons, rice fields, hydrological cycles, banyan trees, and coastal life of the Leizhou Peninsula formed his early experience; later, the vascular networks in his father’s heart images brought the body’s internal structures of life into his painting. Through line drawing, mineral pigments, layered coloring, and the long duration of handwork, he transforms personal experience into a way of perceiving living systems, allowing blood vessels, trees, sky, and the human body to become an organic world of mutual generation and continuous life.