MENGTONG

White, white not yet fully filled. Here, white as an over-presence appears not to illuminate but as a space to stage. Vermilion streaks slash toward bruised indigo but veer; ochre smolders toward turquoise and halts. Lines meander in loose tandem; patches ripple like echoes. This is a space that does not contain, but unfolds, through the restless interplay of forms. Foliage? An interior? A skyline? A face? Perhaps.

Rather than distinct compositions, figures take shape as living tessellations, woven from the rhythms of emergence and dissolution. Neither fully grounded nor ethereal, a brushstroke in Mengtong’s work is less an employment of technique than a pulse; a smudge of colour is less an image than a trace that outlasts its cause, as if the act of looking might scatter.

Abyssal and immediate, the spatial void alternately pulls the eye into an infinite depth and surges forward, forcing every mark to assert itself with desperate clarity. It declares how form is not merely what is seen, but what is withheld. Yet this forming void exiles, flooding the scene with a light that exposes every failed connection. It is a ghost of what could have been, charged with the tension of hesitation, the echo of withdrawal: the hand that suspended. Mengtong does not depict disconnection; she enacts its very structure through the shuddering rhythm of approach and avoidance. Just as a comma splice creates tension by forcing clauses into uneasy proximity, rifts between forms generate a kind of visual friction thrumming with the electricity of discontinuity. What emerges is a visual stutter that bypasses the meaning of words, a deafening silence that lodges directly in the skull.

The illuminated is a vision that has come unstitched. At the core of Mengtong’s work lies this disconnection and rupture, where distance does not tear but tie, boundaries do not demarcate but dissolve. Left is distanced from the right, red distanced from blue, now from then, object from subject, you from me, Lenz from ‘I.’ Yet without left, there is no right; without past, no present; without another body, no body; without Lenz, no I. What remains is an endless doubling: a left to the left, a past to the past, an I to I. The double is neither copy nor original, but the tremor between them where the certainty of boundaries becomes their own unraveling. This is the intimacy of dissolution: a wound, in its most naked state. To be open is to be flayed; to be exposed is to be vulnerable. Mengtong’s practice lingers in the most precarious, drifting along at the threshold of connection.

*The exhibition title derives from Mengtong’s sustained engagement with Georg Büchner’s 1836 novella- fragment Lenz. The figure is an enduring presence throughout her practice, one that both haunts and accompanies her work and rumination. It draws specifically from the line: ”[...], as though in a dream to take into oneself each being within nature as flowers take in air with the waxing and the waning of the moon.” (from Complete plays, Lenz and other writings, 1993 Penguin edition, translated by John Reddick, p.203).

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Mengtong was born in 1994. She obtained her BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2023. She currently lives and works in London. Mengtong engages with the forever shifting identities and consciousness through constructing a psychic landscape that renders her inner world visible through fragmented forms, clashing color masses, and corporeal metaphors. Within this landscape, observation is restored into the domain, where consciousness and form interact. Within her canvases, the representational and the abstract continuously collide, dissolve, and merge - generating a dynamic, fluid terrain where sensation drifts, memory seeps, and the self unravels into blooming shards. Yet Mengtong’s lines remain restrained and deliberate: in rendering these irrationally combined forms, she employs fine, delicate strokes in analogous or complementary colors to produce images and boundaries that oscillate between refined figuration and hazy freedom. Her monumental oil paintings both celebrate and complicate the liminal coexistence of sensuality and emotion, inviting viewers into a space of overwhelming sensory excess - one that borders on a hallucinatory or schizophrenic vision.