Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce “Face to Face”, a solo exhibition by Tong Yanrunan, on February 22, 2025 at 4pm at its Beijing 2nd Space. Curated by Cristiana Collu, former director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the exhibition will systematically present more than 100 works by Tong Yanrunan in recent years.

 

Face to Face:

Portrait and Self-portrait. The Other and the Self - On the Portrait of Tong Yanrunan

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The question of portrait, as an art form and as a means of significance, has always questioned the relationship between the self and the other. Jean-Luc Nancy, in his philosophical reflections, offered an original reading of the portrait as a liminal space, where identity opens up in comparison with otherness. Portrait is never simply a representation of a subject: it is, rather, an opening to the indecipherable, a game of presence and absence, of visible and invisible. This tension between the portrait subject and the observing subject was explored in extraordinary depth to try to redefine the boundaries of the contemporary portrait, avoiding any easy definition of similarity or mimesis.

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Nancy, in his Le regard du portrait, describes the portrait as a place where he sees the world and, at the same time, is sucked into it. The image does not capture the face in its entirety, but returns what the face escapes all the time, what is left of itself. It is this dimension of the other that the portrait plays, a question that lies at the heart of contemporary aesthetics and finds an extraordinary twist in Tong Yanrunan's works.

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Tong Yanrunan's portrait is never a simple record of likeness, but rather a kind of philosophical and phenomenological investigation. Nancy himself has described the portrait as a remarkable “process of exposure,” in which the subject never fully offers itself but is revealed in his recantation, in its resistance to capture. From this perspective, the portrait is never a static surface, but a dynamic field, an incessant question that challenges the viewer to confront the face as an enigma. The portrait of the other — or with a play of words, the other portrait is not just a simple mirror, but a prism that shatters multiple possibilities of being. As Nancy suggests, staging the “other” of a portrait is not only the represented subject, but also the void that separates the image from the observer, the play between presence and absence that makes the portrait a visual and ontological experience.

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Tong Yanrunan stands out for the radicality of his approach. In its essential portraits, Tong gives up all unnecessary details to capture a form of presence that is both immediate and elusive. His canvases, which suggest both rapidity and decisiveness--necessary to seize the moment of the portrait, seem to embody Nancy’s idea of the portrait as an interruption of appearance. The image, far from being a faithful representation of the face, is a place of emergency, where the subject appears as a trace, a shadow, a possibility.

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Tong Yanrunan moves away from the academic traditions of the portrait and approaches a more archaic and spiritual dimension. His faces do not tell stories or present recognizable identities; rather, they are fragments of a collective memory, archetypal figures evoking a sense of universality. In this quest for essentiality, Tong expresses a contemporary sensitivity that recognizes the human face not as a stable identity, but a field of tension and a process of transformation.

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The portrait never fully represents the subject, because the subject is always elsewhere, always in otherness. In Tong Yanrunan’s portrait, this “elsewhere” is palpable: the face presents itself as a fragment of an unattainable whole, an echo of a presence that you never fully allow itself to be grasped. Painting thus becomes an act of revelation, but also of concealment, a way of saying and remaining silent at the same time.

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Jean-Luc Nancy stressed that the portrait, rather than representing a face, represents the idea of a face. This concept is crucial for understanding Tong Yanrunan's work and placing it within the broader context of contemporary aesthetics. In his portraits, the idea of face emerges as a question, an opening to each other that never closes into a definitive answer. For Tong, face is an event, not an icon: an event that takes place in the time of painting and the time of gaze. Nancy describes the face as the threshold of being, a place where the being manifests itself and withdraws. This movement of manifestation and retreat is central to the portrait, which can never be reduced to a mere representation. In Tong Yanrunan's portraits, this threshold is particularly evident: faces appear to emerge from the canvas as appearances, as presences that challenge viewers to confront the irreducibility of each other.

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The other, in the portrait, is not only the represented subject, but also the viewer himself, called upon to identify with the image without ever finding complete correspondence. As Nancy observes, portraits always look who looks at them. In Tong’s portraits, the glancing game is amplified by the simplicity of the brushstroke, which leaves space for the viewer’s imagination. The face is never complete but always in the process of becoming, always open to new possibilities of meaning.

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Another fundamental theme that emerges from Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections is that of the “self-portrayal” in the portrait. The portrait is never just an image of the other but also an image of the self. Every portrait is, in a sense, a self-portrait, because it carries the traces of the artist’s gaze, their way of seeing and being in the world. In Tong Yanrunan’s portraits, this dimension is particularly evident: each face is simultaneously an encounter with the other and a reflection of the very act of painting. But the portrait can never be completely separated from the body that produces it. The artist, in creating a portrait, exposes themselves to the risk of putting their own being into play, of revealing something of themselves in the act of representing the other. The faces are signs of the artist’s presence, traces of their gesture, but also openings toward a world that extends beyond their gaze.

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Tong Yanrunan’s portraits, with their essentiality and mystery, embody this idea of the portrait as a space of otherness and self-reflection. They remind us that the face is never fully ours but always also the other’s, and that every image is, ultimately, a way of confronting the invisible. In this sense, the portrait becomes not only an artistic genre but a philosophy, a way of thinking and being that invites us to look beyond the surface, toward what remains hidden.

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Tong Yanrunan’s works do not merely depict a recognizable subject; on the contrary, they seem to dissolve the subject itself while maintaining a visible trace, an echo. This tension places her work in dialogue with key figures of modern and contemporary painting such as Lucian Freud, Marlene Dumas, and Francis Bacon, who share the ability to dismantle figuration to reveal its internal tensions. In these practices, figuration crumbles to let the otherness of the face emerge: its vulnerable, dark, unspeakable side.

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Lucian Freud, with his carnal and brutal portraits, unveils the human body as a living matter, burdened by its physicality. Marlene Dumas, on the other hand, works on the threshold of indistinctness, painting figures that dissolve in their emotionality, like shadows of bodies or memories. Francis Bacon takes this dissolution to the extreme: his faces are never purely human but rather transfigured, muted screams, bodies deformed by suffering and desire. Similarly, Tong Yanrunan’s portraits do not seek to fix a stable identity but instead evoke what in the subject resists representation, what is always already in flight.

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This dynamic finds a profound echo in Honoré de Balzac’s famous The Unknown Masterpiece. In the story, the painter Frenhofer seeks to create the definitive work, a painting that can reveal not only the form but the very soul of the subject. However, his attempt leads to a total dissolution of figuration: what remains on the canvas is a chaos of colors and forms, a formless matter that has annihilated the subject through an excess of searching. This tale, which has deeply influenced artists and critics of Western art, anticipates the dilemma underlying much of modern painting: the representation of the unrepresentable. Tong’s portraits seem to inhabit this space. Their dissolution is an opening: the face unravels to reveal its fragility, its transient nature. In this perspective, Tong aligns herself with a tradition that does not seek to portray identity as something stable but as a process, an oscillation between presence and absence. Her painting, therefore, does not depict faces but existences in the process of becoming, presences that emerge and withdraw.

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Another fundamental aspect of Tong Yanrunan’s work is its material quality. Her dense, pasty brushstrokes and the tactile sense that permeates her paintings evoke the modeling of clay or wax, bringing her painterly practice closer to sculpture. In this sense, a comparison with Medardo Rosso proves particularly illuminating. Medardo Rosso, one of the most innovative sculptors of the late 19th century, explored the boundary between form and dissolution, creating works in wax and plaster that seem to evaporate in light. His sculptures do not seek to fix a figure but to capture a moment, a fleeting impression. In his portraits, such as Bambina che ride or Ecce Puer, the face emerges as an uncertain vision, an apparition that seems to fade as one observes it. Similarly, Tong Yanrunan’s paintings do not define the contours of the faces but suggest them, modeling them as if they were shaped directly by light and matter.

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This tension between painting and sculpture, between surface and volume, invites reflection on the meaning of material in art. Painting, like sculpture, is an act of creation that involves the manipulation of matter. In Tong’s paintings, the paint becomes almost a form of two-dimensional sculpture: the faces seem to emerge from the canvas as reliefs, shaped by the artist’s gesture. This plastic quality of painting refers to a conception of art as a bodily, physical process, where the artist’s hand is tangibly present.

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Once again, Jean-Luc Nancy, in his essay Noli me tangere, reflects on the tactile dimension of vision, emphasizing how visual art is never purely optical but always also sensory. In Tong’s portraits, this dimension is particularly evident: the faces are not simply to be looked at but to be “touched” with the gaze. The painterly matter becomes a skin, a living surface that carries the traces of its being shaped. Painting, in this sense, is not only a means of representation but a form of incarnation, a way of making the corporeal visible.

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The material is always more than mere support: it is the place where meaning manifests, where the visible becomes sensible. In Tong’s portraits, the painterly matter is simultaneously presence and absence, body and trace. The painting does not simply represent the face but models it, shapes it, renders it visible in its fleetingness.

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This material quality refers to a conception of art as an event, as an encounter between the artist’s gesture and the resistance of matter. In Tong’s portraits, painting becomes a dynamic space where the subject emerges and dissolves at the same time. This is what makes her paintings so powerful: they are never simply images but processes and movements. The connection between painting and sculpture, between the visible and the tactile, reminds us that art is always a total sensory experience, involving not only sight but also the body. In Tong Yanrunan’s portraits, this experience is amplified by the material quality of the painting, which makes the faces palpable, alive, present. Tong invites us to look beyond the surface, toward the very matter of art, toward what makes the visible a sensible experience. In her portraits, she undoes the subject to reveal its transient essence, to show us that art is never a definitive answer but an opening toward the infinite.

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