TSONG PU: OFF-ROAD AURA

TSONG's signature style of grid-pattern imprints showcases a kind of evenly-distributed labor. What appears to be a meticulously-controlled structure, when examined closely, is actually made up of small squares, characterized by a minute painterly quality by virtue of their texture, heterogeneity, and imprecision.

These works demonstrate how TSONG cleverly employed his own artistic language to advance and transform the vast lineages of Western abstract art in the 20th century, including Piet Mondrian's geometric structures, the visuality of Op Art, and the concept of Minimalism. 

TSONG's approach is more like a miniscule accumulation responding to 'what happens after Minimalism. His practice is in essence a production of hidden connotations, and continues to point to the outside of painting-relating to the reality of everyday life, commonly agreed-upon signs and meanings, or even specific references to art history. 

For TSONG, grids are always about a process of addition. Brimming with gestural content, they are small units 'waiting to be filled up-whether by color blocks, imprints, brushstrokes, or folded lines. Ultimately, an infinite number of painting units, arranged in a grid formation, constitute a rhythmic, moving image. Tsong's strategy of 'miniscule addition' resonates with the idea of seeing the void as existence proposed by Japanese Mono-ha painters in the 1960s and 70s.

Profound Geometry

The force that dominates TSONG's grid structures is almost always consistent in his two-dimensional works. The composition of these works is a strict extension of proper grid structures. Viewed at a distance, all the color blocks, either abide by horizontal or vertical principles, or are laid out according to 45-degree diagonals. As our eyes get closer to the painting, block by block, all the imprints and short brushstrokes in each tiny unit also function according to geometric laws based on the regular square.

TSONG introduces daily ready-mades such as aluminum and paper into his stamp painting, so as to underscore the overlapping or confrontation of microscopic spaces. The ready-mades of varied textures and weights may slant on the canvas or give rise to other figures. They become the visual foci and perform changes amidst order and harmony. "Change is existence," said TSONG Pu. He has been regulating and simplifying his ideas and seeking differences in the same. He transforms everyday things into "rhetorical language and punctuations marks, making them poetic."

In a series of relief sculptures, aluminum sticks of different lengths are primarily responsible for bringing rhythmic changes to the canvas. We can also notice that on the original white background filled with check patterns and minute textures, there are also a number of white squares with no particular texture. They are undoubtedly a part of the formal layout, yet they also imply a gestural suggestiveness at times they look like marks that the aluminum sticks could have made when brushing over the surface. 

This gestural suggestiveness does not spring from traces of the hand left by the artistic production process. In other words, TSONG did not truly use aluminum sticks to brush over the surface to reduce the surface texture, just like he did not peel the sculpture away from the wall. On the contrary, these effects were achieved by semantically 'arranging' pure visual symbols. They are 'fake movements' generated by a kind of ideographic language, paralleling the 'real gestures' meant to fill his grids.