Artist: Tianyue Zhong

LBF Contemporary presents Between Earth and Tide, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Tianyue Zhong. This evocative exhibition features a series of 10 paintings, inviting viewers into an introspective journey, exploring resilience, memory, and the shifting nature of time.

Between Earth and Tide An essay by Matthew J Holman


“I place the figures in an upside-down world, vanishing into the spaces between humidity and heat. They appear as if lying down, foot by foot, one shadowing the other. The memory of the muscles became useless, and the mind softened, seizing illusions” –– Tianyue Zhong


What is in a picture? What is it meant to do? For centuries, the name of the game was felicity to the natural world, or the ambition to render in paint its elusive textures, spread out in unfolding time and snared by the painter onto the canvas like a net. Artists became extraordinarily adept at rendering, as close as dammit, the curvature of a model’s cheekbones, the sun-adoring stretches of the cypress tree, the warped reflection in the convex mirror. But, as the story goes, with the advent of the daguerreotype photograph in 1840, all bets were off: photograph could do what painting could not. The painter stared redundancy in the face. Since that moment, the earliest in successive groans of anguish on the imminence of photography’s deathblow to painting struggled to sit easily with the capacity of photography to instantaneously render a moment for perpetuity. But that was then, and this is now. Part of a thrilling new generation of expatriate artists from China and Hong Kong, which also includes Xiyao Wang and Kristy Chan, Tianyue Zhong is a painter rooted firmly in the heady tradition of gestural abstraction, but who nevertheless works tirelessly to translate the freighted references of the world into her paintings. Photographic references are essential to her compositions. Importantly, though, this is not principally to spur and stimulate visual likeness (cheekbones, trees, mirrors) but in the complexities of human emotion bound up in the subtleties of gesture. Her pictures are interested in the ways that an arm on a shoulder might tell us all we need to know about compassion, or an itinerant body weighed down by worldly possessions reflects the pressures of the world, hefty and leaden. If Abstract Expressionists like Joan Mitchell or Helen Frankenthaler sought to ‘remember landscapes’ and transpose them into their paintings from memory, Zhong seeks to carry over something more substantial from her experiences. ‘The paintings are not about tracing memories, but rather about recording and capturing the shock of feelings that evolve over time,’ Zhong reflects: ‘by giving the fresh marks space to linger on the canvas, I can concentrate these sensations together, forming a unique space-time.’ For instance, in Catch Me (2024), the figures torque, coalesce and accumulate like the thinned lines of a spider’s web coagulating into a firmer structure. The greens could not be greener. As Zhong loosened her brushstrokes, her sense of the work’s execution shifted: ‘moving at a fast pace without stopping, there was an impulsive desire to create chaos’, the artist reflected, ‘yet I sought a tipping point where everything fell into place intuitively.’ Zhong’s meditative assault on the canvas, reminiscent of the dynamic gesturalism of Martha Jungwirth, tracks a process of direct rhythm in which the full extremities of the artist’s reach record her physical presence in the work. It is compelling, then, the way Zhong moves from horizontal to vertical formats, taking the horizon line with her in Cicada Song (2024) so that the central tension feels extraordinarily, almost improbably, balanced; taught, like it could fall at any moment but won’t. If the titles and the palette of these works happily transport us to sunny climes–Los Angeles, where Zhong lives and works, or La Bastide de Laurence near L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where she has recently returned from the inaugural LBF Contemporary residency–then it is because they understand the interior logic of seasonality, its gradient shifts and textured cadences, not as they are seen but as they are felt. The title of A Flicker in the Glass (2024) speaks to a moment of transition, of flux, of transience. Barely legible, but discerned all the same, the composition distinguishes two figures, nearly lost in a flurry of wild brushstrokes, which was insp-
ired by an artist’s photograph of an elderly mother, and so a picture, in Zhong’s words, ‘of nurturing, aging, and the passage of time–feelings I experience as a daughter.’ Dressed in traditional Tibetan attire, the Chuba, she is cautiously held and led down a staircase, while her daughter wears casual dress: jeans, t-shirt, with a jacket wrapped around her waist. It is often said that one cannot choose one’s parents, but it is also true that one cannot choose one’s children. On the one hand, this depiction of tender reliance addresses the child’s responsibility to the parent, while on the other Zhong’s sheer facture is so powerfully secreted onto the surface that we cannot help but revel in its vigorous movement: its subject appears to be the passage of time itself. ‘The painting evolved from figuration to abstraction, with the oil paint becoming watery due to the added mediums,’ Zhong continues: ‘the paint flowed outside of the contours, was partially removed, intruded into the figurative form that looked like a delusion.’ Elsewhere, in Moon Diving (2024), the dense accumulation of quick-tempered marks, short and staccato, suggest a foreground of earthy forms–soil, sodden mud and shored-up clay–while the turquoise and teal lines in the upper half of the canvas imply sea or sky best by storm. The same is true in Trot! (2024). We might be orientated by the horizon-line and pale summer’s sky, but the composition refuses to ground us, as the unmistakable force of pent-up energy in the centre–half-figuring a stallion, we surmise, from the title–is thrown across the picture-plane. Zhong’s sense of attention to the way people, objects, and things move, their subtleties and their grace, is captivating. Hers is a sensuous, sonorous abstraction but not one that can be in any way reduced to mere decoration. Zhong’s paintings might not strictly look like the real world, but they are made of the real world, comprised of the unseen and foundational rhythms of landscape and gesture.

Tianyue Zhong (b. 1994, Chengdu, China) received an MA in painting from Royal College of Art in 2020 and a BA in Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. Zhong creates paintings and drawings that illustrate the uncontrollable nature of life. By using historical photographs she finds in research and shooting her own imagery, Zhong aims to capture a transformation between waiting and losing, engaged with the exuberant handling of line and paint. Fear, with its meaning in her life and her painting process, is the powerhouse for Zhong to repeatedly paint the same subject matter over time, whereas the body and shapes are incomplete and seem strangled. Zhong’s work is in the collection of AMOCA in Cardiff, Wales and the New Century Art Foundation (NCAF) in Shanghai, China.