After the Waves and the Dusk: Tong Kunniao
Hua International is pleased to present After the Waves and the Dusk, a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Tong Kunniao, on view during Berlin Art Week. The exhibition opens not with a declaration but with a mood: suspended, liminal, and disoriented. Inspired by Seawater and Rising Sun, a 15th-century ink painting by Ming dynasty master Dai Jin, Tong’s site-specific installation refracts the gallery into a dreamlike threshold—sea-wave motifs ripple across the windows, transforming the street beyond into a mirage. The horizon glows, unreachable. Below, a fog drifts across the floor like memory or prophecy, charged with melancholy, but strangely light. This interplay between illusion and surface, interior and exterior, becomes the exhibition’s emotional weather.
Tong Kunniao is part of a new generation of Chinese artists—those born in the 1980s and 1990s—whose work emerges from a China radically different than the one that shaped the post-Mao avant-garde. The earlier generation responded to ideological trauma and collective memory with stark realism or critical detachment, artists like Tong engage a different intensity: shaped by rapid urbanization, digital saturation, and the surreal logic of late capitalism. Their sensibilities are often lyrical, world-building, queer in structure, and emotionally opaque. As cultural theorist Kyla McDonald describes, this is the rise of a Y3K aesthetic—a vision of the year 3000 and beyond, defined by speculative technology, post-humanism, and Asianfuturism. Artists like Lu Yang and Cui Jie exemplify this: their avatars and architectures fold the past into dystopian futures. But where their work turns decisively toward the virtual, Tong stays grounded in the physical, the painterly. He looks backward as much as forward, turning to Chinese art history not for symbolism, but for structure, atmosphere, and emotional code.
The paintings in After the Waves and the Dusk do not tell stories. They unfurl like emotional topographies—maps of unease. In works like Calm Before the Black Storm (2025) and The Benighted Lord of the Waves (2025), we meet post-human figures that are neither cyborgs nor ghosts, but assemblages of affect and debris: a dismembered green rib cage rising from the tide; a mechanical ruler with no dynasty, surrounded by drifting icons and failed machines. Their world is one of electric storms and quiet collapse. These are not metaphors. They speak in the language of dread, absurdity, and spectral grace.
Rather than quoting tradition, Tong metabolizes it. His use of Ming painting techniques, literati architecture, and atmospheric brushwork is not ironic or conceptual. The fragments in his paintings are not citations but emotional prosthetics, grounding an otherwise unstable visual field. If the digital era atomizes meaning, Tong returns to the past to find orientation—not to imitate, but to feel. His aesthetic is one of emotional scenography: ritual, not monument. If every monument must fall, his is a world where symbols have detached from grammar.
This tension between representation and re-presentation undergirds the entire exhibition. Where Western art history has long associated imitation with mastery or rupture—formal innovation through critical distance—Chinese visual culture has privileged ambiguity, resonance, and the internalization of form. The historical references in Tong’s work are not conceptual citations but vehicles for feeling. Unlike Western artists such as Sherrie Levine, whose appropriation strategies were framed by theories like the "death of the author" and a cool intellectual distance, Tong uses art history as a personal reservoir—an emotional toolset. In literati painting, brushwork was a philosophy; space, a rhythm.
In this sense, After the Waves and the Dusk is not an exhibition about history, identity, or critique. It is about how mood survives when meaning no longer makes sense. Tong builds fog, not monument. He paints ruins, but refuses nostalgia. His paintings offer no resolution—only the eerie dignity of enduring, of surviving the storm.
