Interview with Lao Tongli and Craig L. Yee
Conducted and Edited by Yang Meiju
16 October, 2024
First published on ARTDBL
Stepping into Lao Tongli's solo exhibition Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems at INKstudio Beijing, one easily enters a sustained state of visual absorption. The eye cannot help but follow a single thread among thousands, tracing where it might eventually lead, while the attention — pulled by an elusive force — begins to lose focus, to drift outward. Until, at some unmarked moment, the viewer suddenly catches hold of something: the presence of emotion — though its arrival went unnoticed, it is present…
A long-held misunderstanding of traditional Chinese painting — shuimo or "ink wash", gongbi or "meticulous brush" — had made it impossible to imagine that such an immersive experience could take place within a gongbi exhibition. Lao Tongli's work shatters that stereotype. This is, of course, because what he seeks to depict and explore is not an existing path for gongbi, but rather a new artistic language — one forged from traditional techniques yet transformed — expanding into his own visual iconography, while endowing those images with an enduring vitality and a cross-cultural, subjective dimension.
The artist's reinterpretation of traditional gongbi methods and creative processes is ultimately cast into images that are impossible to forget: lines both intricate and orderly, intertwining and coiling into an aesthetic of repetition and accumulation; colors alternately bright and dark, soaring and somber, flowing across the surface according to a subtle order — attentive viewers may notice that the palette follows its own hidden laws, as if part of a secret design. And then there are the yixiang or "idea-images" delineated by those lines: at times they appear as blood vessels, as if the viewer might accidentally tumble into the heart before them; at other times, as the branching boughs of trees, making one suspect they have wandered deep into a nocturnal forest. Later still, those lines weave and grow into human forms — vegetal yet divine. Just as everything begins to take on a solemn stillness, a rupture: the sky appears, clouds emerge. It is like arriving at an unexpected clearing after a long walk or drawing a deep breath after minutes of held breath underwater…
For Craig L. Yee, director of INKstudio and curator of Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems, Lao Tongli's gongbi practice is unlike the layered covering-over of classical oil painting. Rather, it is an accumulation of ink and color — layer upon layer — and a patchwork of discrete passages: a labor-intensive maximalism. The lines, the contours, the transparent and semi-transparent pigments: at least three layers, sometimes as many as six. Though each colored area may appear one-dimensional, it is in fact a multi-layered synthesis — a cultivation carried out in tens of thousands of minimal units.
Watching Lao Tongli paint bears no resemblance to the sweeping, unbridled gestures of ink wash or expressionist oil painting. The paper is more like his plot of land; his brush can only attend to the small square immediately before him. One also rarely encounters large expanses of liubai or "unpainted reserve" in Lao Tongli's works. This blankness, rather, seems to function as his own hidden spiritual domain. "I actually work in reverse," he says. "The areas I paint are my liubai; the areas left unpainted are my painting."
The exhibition is structured around three series — The Desire of Libido (2013-2020), Above the Horizon · Sky (2018-present), and Self and the Others (2021-present) — which together trace and distill Lao Tongli's output since 2013. Behind the evolution of the work lies the artist's deceptively simple yet rather protracted personal history, and the struggles and confusions of self-identification and identity reconstruction that inevitably accompany the decision to become a contemporary artist.
Lao Tongli was born in Tujiao Village, on the coast of Leizhou in Guangdong Province. From an early age, he displayed an interest in traditional painting. After graduating from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2006, he first traveled to France to work under the celebrated contemporary artist Yang Jiechang — himself a master of gongbi technique. There, Lao Tongli arrived at a new understanding of how he might pursue gongbi and what kind of gongbi he wished to create. It was following this period that he resolved to become a contemporary artist. The true starting point of this path, however, began in a rented room in a Guangzhou urban village — for a few hundred yuan a month. From that moment, Lao Tongli says, he made up his mind. During those years in Xiaozhou Village, he rarely socialized: no time, and no money. So, he simply stayed home, devoting at least ten hours each day to focused work, maintaining a low-cost lifestyle, a regular schedule, and a slow but steady pace of creation.
Looking back from today, the beginning of the story seems easy enough to identify. But for the artist at that time, inhabiting a moment when the future was still unknown, all he could do was turn on a lamp, lean close to the paper, and trace — line by line. More often than not, Lao Tongli is grateful that he did not work in oil, and thus escaped the threshold of having to rent a spacious, well-lit studio to launch his career as an artist. For him, the portability of the gongbi craft amounts almost to an exemption. It has the virtue of being less sensitive to light than oil painting; even in an urban village, by the faintest glimmer of a lamp, he could keep on drawing.
In the interview, Lao Tongli speaks of Trees on the Other Shore No. 01, the work displayed in the dark room on the ground floor. Its sketches date back to 2014, but the painting was not completed until nine years later. The temporality embedded in the work points directly to the condition of his practice, while also serving as an almost physical metaphor for all his works, all his actions, all his expressions over these years: life is always growing upward, and in the process of growing, searching, and longing, there always stands on the opposite shore an other shore. How does one cross the water and finally arrive there? For Lao Tongli, this is perhaps a kind of upstream migration-overcoming the friction and resistance of life and livelihood, while also struggling against the gravity exerted by art itself.
Fortunately, during this upstream journey, Lao Tongli encountered INKstudio. The gallery saw in him the possibility of moving traditional Chinese gongbi toward the contemporary, and toward the global. Though the collaboration had its twists and turns, it seemed, nonetheless, to unfold as if naturally. INKstudio's direction and rhythm from that point were clear: Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems served both as a reward for the artist's more than a decade of quiet endurance and as a trial leap before leading him onto a broader stage.
"An artist like this is very rare in China today," Craig L. Yee says. "We have hundreds, even thousands, of technically accomplished gongbi painters. But those who can achieve both of these transformations at once are very few — because it is difficult. Lao Tongli has done it. So, for us, he is an extremely important artist."
Coincidentally, when INKstudio first opened in Beijing a decade ago, Lao Tongli was present — as Yang Jiechang's assistant. Standing in that space, a faint thought crossed his mind: it would be wonderful to have an exhibition here one day. At that time, Lao Tongli — still living in the cramped quarters of an urban village — had just begun work on The Desire of Libido series. He could not have imagined that ten years later, as if guided by fate, he and his works would complete this "journey north," carrying with them the distinctive temperament of the south.
It is worth noting that this exhibition does not attempt a complete retrospective of the artist's career. Rather, it focuses on Lao Tongli's output from 2013 onward. Craig L. Yee explains that from a curatorial perspective, the works created after The Desire of Libido are undoubtedly of great importance — but this does not mean that what came before lacks value. On the contrary, in those earlier years, Lao Tongli was engaged in various experiments at the level of gongbi technique, and The Desire of Libido stands as the result of all those experiments. At the same time, Lao Tongli's search for an artistic language is not a matter of discontinuity. Even the practice and gropings of the period before 2013, in essence, a process of seeking yixiang from the external world and then, through personal experience, translating them onto the painting — and it is precisely this kind of yixiang that holds meaning for him. What he needs to do is respond to these yixiang with his own profound experiences and thereby generate the painting. At the core remains his individual life journey and experience.
In Craig L. Yee's view, Lao Tongli's work is the product of a long-term commitment, and this "long-termism" characterizes his entire artistic practice. It is also why INKstudio, when introducing Lao Tongli to an international audience, takes particular care to present him as a young, emerging artist. For whether within the field of traditional gongbi or on the level of the contemporary, the path he has taken is highly distinctive — "quite simply, an anomaly."
Driven by an interest in the exhibition itself and its broader implications for the art ecosystem, ARTDBL engaged in an in-depth conversation with Lao Tongli and Craig L. Yee. Our discussion began with Lao Tongli as an individual and extended to the present and future of gongbi as an artistic form, INKstudio's commitment to bringing Chinese art to the world, and the role of Chinese art in the global context today… Below is the edited transcript of the conversation between ARTDBL and the artist. As is customary, the text was reviewed by the interviewees prior to publication.
What does it mean to you to have this exhibition, Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems, at this moment?
Lao Tongli: When I was in university, people often talked about experimental ink but rarely discussed the possibility of gongbi engaging with the contemporary. In the traditional view, gongbi is seen as meticulous, neat, rule-bound — it seems to stay at the level of form, regarded as a kind of self-cultivation or aesthetic pleasure, tending toward the decorative, and difficult to connect with actual life. I've been interested in traditional painting since I was young, and I majored in gongbi in university. My temperament clearly isn't suited for xieyi or "freehand" painting. I prefer to experiment within gongbi, searching for a distinctive style of my own. I try to situate my work within a larger context, thinking about how to break through existing forms. For me personally, Iconology of Life: Lao Tongli's Experiential Semiotics of Living Systems is a kind of summary of this phase of my work.
ARTDBL: As a southern artist, this exhibition marks a kind of journey north. Do you have any expectations — about what it might stir up, or what kind of response you might get?
Lao Tongli: I feel more like a stranger walking into a place with a very special atmosphere. My impression is that Beijing and Shanghai offer artists good exhibition spaces — that's very different from the south. The south has very few platforms, so many southern artists often find themselves asking, "Is there still any point in persisting with painting?" And very few manage to stick with it. So, to come up to Beijing for an exhibition — that's already a very fortunate thing. As for what kind of response I will get, I am not sure. But if people come to the exhibition and think, "Ah — so gongbi can be done like this too," that's already enough. What happens next, the echoes it might generate — that's not something I can predict or control.
ARTDBL: This exhibition focuses mainly on your work from 2013 onward. What was the thinking behind that decision?
Lao Tongli: The exhibition basically traces the past eleven years of my work in chronological order. At the entrance is The Desire of Libido, which I began in 2013. Compared to my earlier work, this series is more closely tied to my lived experience. It was my father's illness that led me to discover — and begin — the third transformation of my artistic language. It also opened up a broader space for thinking and exploration, because it involves not just the self — my inner world, the dense, intersecting blood vessels and nerves — but also blood ties, relationships between the individual and others, between nature and the world. It allowed me to stand at a more macro perspective and reflect on myself. This was also where I found a path through gongbi toward a larger world. For example, when blood vessels become the structure of the world, in my lived experience, their fractal form closely resembles the intricate branching of trees. Once you find that internal logic and see the similarity, you are naturally captivated. The world becomes a vast network.
ARTDBL: In your works, we often see the accumulation of very concrete yixiang — intertwining blood vessels, branches — yet the resulting image is highly abstract. How do you express your lived experience and connection to contemporary society through painting?
Lao Tongli: Before I begin to draw, I always need to find a medium that resonates with how I feel at that moment. Many people see gongbi as highly disciplined and meticulous — using exquisite technique and color to paint a flower, for example. But what does that flower have to do with a person? What meaning does it carry? What is the difference between painting that flower and simply taking a photograph of it? For me, at least, that kind of painting has no meaning. By contrast, I prefer to have and use a stylistic language of my own — to weave, to assemble my own images, to express my own feelings. No matter how my artistic language evolves, this has never changed.
Take the first phase of my work, from 2007 to 2008. What I was really expressing was constraint. I used shuanggou or "double-outline brush lines" to render ropes, shaping figures that are all, without exception, bound. And that was, in fact, my own state at the time. After graduating from the art academy, I faced a series of questions: Should I make a living first, or pursue art? Should I follow my own vision, or take a more mediocre yet simpler path? Would my choice burden my family? How do I fit into society? How do I support myself? Everywhere, constraints; everywhere, struggle. There I was, sitting in my rented room in the urban village, facing the painting paper, but my mind was consumed by the pressure of daily life — like a thorn in my back, a bone stuck in my throat. Yet at the same time, I sensed that while constraint restricts, it also pushes you upward, to break free, to find freedom. So, I presented that conflict in my painting.
The second phase, from 2009 to 2012, focused more on the struggle within constraint. Many minimal lines — each representing a person's trajectory, desire, or inner ideal or emotion — all the things and relationships that can be used as metaphors, became tangled together. It seemed like the true face of the world: everyone's fates interwoven and intersecting, forming a network — dense and entangled, yet harmonious.
For me, the third phase is when my own artistic language truly began to take shape. But the first two phases were the prehistory of that language, step by step. Indispensable. A crucial process.
ARTDBL: Compared to many other contemporary and more mainstream artists, the process of finding your own artistic language seems to have been longer for you. How do you feel about that?
Lao Tongli: I believe every artist has their own experience and feelings on this path. Gongbi is my path, but it also imposes limitations. Having chosen it, I have to work with it. Line is an element I cannot do without. So my thinking has to start from there: to search for the structural relationship between line and things, between line and experience. This is why, after my father fell ill, as I revisited the images of his heart angiogram, looking again and again at those dense yet strangely ordered neural networks and blood vessels, I felt a deep impact. That image — black and white pulsing together, carrying the misty quality of ink — seemed to be in perfect resonance with life and nature. At the same time, I recalled my university years, when I came to Beijing in winter and looked up at the bare, gray branches against the sky. In that moment, you feel a kind of wonder: Where did these tree-like blood vessels come from? They seem like the earth's blood vessels. Memory and experience opened up in that way and began to grow. That was what led to The Desire of Libido, and later Above the Horizon · Sky, and the recent Self and the Others.
Behind the changing surfaces of the work, the stylistic presence of the line has always been there. And that, to me, is very important. Some artists might see the line as limiting, outdated, not modern enough, not contemporary enough. But for me, it is a premise and a foundation I must preserve. To use a seemingly Sinicized symbol to express my own life and depict my own experience — this feels entirely natural. It so happens that these subjects and expressions matched my state of mind and my aspirations at the time. The Desire of Libido, for example, operates on multiple complex levels: the panic and anxiety of my father's illness, the unwillingness to let go and the longing for familial love, and a reverence for the cycle of life and its ceaseless generation. Carrying these emotions, I began to paint blood vessels, trees, skies, clouds — and that has continued for more than a decade.
ARTDBL: In this very long process of searching, with so little output, have there been moments of self-doubt?
Lao Tongli: Yes, absolutely. Especially after switching from single lines to shuanggou. The limitations became greater; the space for expression seemed to contract and narrow. But fortunately, at that very moment, the yixiang I had chosen revealed its own expansiveness. For example, the blood vessels and nerves I saw in the human heart, the lightning and tree branches in the sky — the networked, fractal branching took on a much greater universality. So, my painting, while becoming more difficult, also became, in a sense, "simpler." Because it seemed that by simply repeating these images, I could achieve new interpretations and explorations and thereby break through certain limitations that had once seemed unshakable. This included pushing the depth of the painting further, opening up another space within space, and endowing it with more imagination — allowing hopes that I could not otherwise touch to reside there. When I painted The Nine-Colored Deer and Above the Horizon · Sky, what I was translating were certain childhood images and perceptions lodged deep in my mind, layered together with my understanding of the city. If even a fraction of this composite experience can appear in viewers when they see the work, that is a rare and precious resonance.
ARTDBL: It seems there were easier paths and options available. Why did not you take them?
Lao Tongli: Perhaps because finding an artistic language of one's own is never easy. You have to be in enough pain and be lucky enough; only then will it appear. And once you begin to use it, it is full of challenge and the unknown. That unknown is addictive. Before 2013, I had never experienced this kind of sustained obsession and passion. Back then, I would paint and paint but struggle to move forward, feeling that this was not the direction I wanted — a kind of stuckness. But starting with The Desire of Libido, it became unstoppable. It was as if the yixiang and the works were growing out of themselves, carrying the vitality of ceaseless generation. This feeling was too precious to let go. If I had given up midway, I might have languished along with it. So, from this perspective, I often feel that it is I who need gongbi more than gongbi needs me.
ARTDBL: Listening to you describe your state of painting, it sounds a bit like Sisyphus pushing his boulder — almost a sense of the absurd or futile.
Lao Tongli: It usually takes me two to three months to complete a single painting. That may seem like a very long time, but the process is actually quite steady. It is highly procedural: each day, I paint a small section. Gongbi emphasizes a kind of emotional consistency — minimal fluctuation, a stable rhythm. My gongbi painting is like a time scale; each brushstroke is the record of a second. Before you know it, a day has been painted away. Each day leaves its own trace and density — only so much can be painted in a day, and rushing is futile. Why do I have so few exhibitions? There have been many invitations. But it is impossible — unlike other schools of art, where you can work through the night when deadlines approach, gongbi allows no such practice. Because once you rush, you cannot paint the way you want.
The process may sound somewhat futile. But once you are truly immersed, focus makes you forget yourself, forget the troubles of daily life. Then the pleasure of drawing lines slowly emerges. You enter a steady, self-forgetful flow. Especially at the end of the day, when you look back and see how much you have painted, there is an immediate joy: you have advanced another inch. This feeling is very much like a farmer cultivating the fields.
