Wave, 2019
performance Dinawan, Malaysia
single channel video (colour, silent)
19 min 46 sec
Filmed during a residency on Dinawan Island in Malaysia, Tong Wenmin’s durational performance and video, Wave, is a succession of surging forms enacted by the body and the sea. Face down in the sea, water flooding her nostrils as her limbs draw a series of shapes with the waves, Tong destabilises the romanticised notion of a pure, unadulterated communion with nature. By subjecting herself to relentless rhythms of the sea, Tong highlights the profound entanglement of human and more-than-human life the work suggests that neither exists in isolation but rather through constant interaction and mutual influence.
Tong Wenmin is a leading voice in the new generation of contemporary Chinese artists. Using her body as a living sculpture, Tong creates captivating images that propose new, diverse, and even contradictory understandings of the human. Born in 1989 in Chongqing, China, where she continues to live and work, Tong received a BFA from the Oil Painting Department at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2012. Following her graduation, Tong shifted her practice to focus upon performance art, developing one of the most conceptually rigorous and physically demanding bodies of work in this medium.
Tong’s work has received extensive international recognition, participating in exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; M+, Hong Kong; Salzburg Museum der Moderne; HE ART MUSEUM, Foshan; OCAT Shenzhen; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; and A4 Art Museum, Chengdu.
Presented by White Space (Beijing) in association with Videotage (Hong Kong).