The Group Unconscious Expressions in the Art of Tong Zhengang

Someone said that Tong Zhengang has always been changing. True, if compared to his fellow contemporaries of around the same age, he is indeed making dramatic improvements every few years. Look at the other artists who paints in the new literati genre, they are still indulging in the mere feelings of brush strokes, and are producing simple deliberately disproportional figures. The new-age artists instead keep on treading down the path of the so-called “blending of ink wash and abstracts”. Those who cannot follow a genre turn at last to trends: their head turn with the direction of the wind, and end up dizzy.

Many critics find that Tong Zhengang has been constantly changing his style, and is a master at manipulating different expressions. This is only superficially right. Some even claim that Tong Zhengang is always metamorphosing in terms of symbols, that he is a master of symbolic creations. This is also correct, but again, only to a superficial level.

From my point of view, the true underlying factor that morphs in Tong Zhengang is his state of mind.
If one were to pick out representing works of his various stages, and line them up chronologically for you to view, will you still consider that their differences are mere changes of expressions and symbols?

The figures in his earliest “new literati” paintings were mostly without features, their faces looked like new potatoes without any expressions. Thus all the scholars that he depicted could only communicate through their stance and poses, either sitting or standing, in a carefree, an almost mindless, zombie like state.

The modern women that he painted have facial features. They too did not seem to have any expressions at all, and they are beautiful, serene, and cool.

The later portraits of ladies are not even modern --- they are more like rotund country girls who just came into the urban town, with blush cheeks, voluptuous lips, and heavy noses. Their eyes reflect a satisfying smile, as if they are happy to live a consumer’s life in the city. These girls are healthy, strong, dazzling, and worldly. They are submersed in the consumer’s world of desire, and they dress themselves up like a beautiful flower vase. They have become ornaments like the antique stool, the crystal fish bowl, the Persian cat. Tong Zhengang have put these girls on the same level as these objects, presenting them as objects. However, the strange thing is, after a few years, or even ten years, when we look at these girls expressions, they have transformed into faces of sadness, discontent, and helplessness! Tong Zhengang did not deliberately put on those faces for them; he never even thought that they would develop into expressions like these.

Yes, this is a kind of group unconscious expression. It is a kind of expression that changes along with life. It is a kind of expression that changes along with the artist’s state of mind.

When Tong Zhengang decided to use oil paint to depict a group of “Men and Women of Peonies”, their group unconscious expressions changed again.

Regarding these oil paintings, Tong Zhengang’s female assistant once said something extremely memorable: “Use my fingertip to touch your grey tenderness.” This is sensitive, and is very well said. Is Tong Zhengang a tender person? Yes, he is a man who treats women with delicateness. Are the women in his paintings tender beings? Yes, they are all good girls, a strong need of tactile communication emanates from their expressions and their bodies. The interesting thing is, if we compare the painting techniques and the posture he takes when painting, we will find that the tactile feelings emanating from his pictorial figures are also constantly changing unconscious facial expressions. He uses l2ines and ink splashes that are almost violent when depicting the delicate, white, and slim modern females. He even used concrete and plaster on the surface of rice paper! On the urban rich girls, he uses an almost masochistic pleasure. Whereas on the village girls from the country side, he uses a much more tender touch, from which one can feel the body temperature. And now, underneath the vast grey sky in his paintings, the grey men and women in his grey or colorful flower beds. “Use my fingertip to touch your grey tenderness”, from this I can guess, that he uses a soft bounded brush, tenderly brushes it across the grey color gradient, his heart is full of sweetness that flows through his fingertips. It is as if he is playing with a ceramic instrument from the times of Emperor Yongzheng.

What kind of group unconscious expression is this kind of grey tenderness? An experienced person that has been floating in a material world, a world of the colours of temptation, will he see a world of grey or a world of lust? Perhaps it is all in the instance of a woman’s smile when picking a flower. The mysterious expressions on these grey men and women perhaps will not be understood until a few years later.

I feel that Tong Zhengang, among his contemporary painters, he has a quality that is not mixed with the worldly matters. It is a record of all the group unconscious expressions that came out of the consumers’ world of today. In time, when we look back in history these group expressions, we will find these group unconscious expressions most real.