in Poyang Lake at the foot of Mount Lu
lived a blackfish demon
it preyed on people
until a boy with three shadows slew it
the lake ran red for ten miles
so the tale is told in What Confucius Would Not Speak Of
by Qing-era poet Yuan Mei
who favored strangeness, violence, chaos, and spirits
I find that boy evil
others say
the three pagodas at Three Pools Mirroring the Moon
are legs of an incense burner turned upside down
trapping the blackfish demon beneath
on a full moon night
Mr Tong secretly toppled a pagoda
the demon slipped free
Conditioned by paradox and tuned to poetics’ static, Noise Chapel slips between shrine and wreckage, diagram and disorientation. At its origin lies a toppled pagoda, brought down not in revolt but by misstep: a real yet elusive Mr. Tong whose accidental act unsettles the certainty of inherited structures. The site, steeped in classical beauty and symbolism, shifts off balance. Pagodas, tiered and ornate, once unquestioned, are unscrewed and reworked in copper, aluminum, lacquer, resin, and wood. Not ruins, but rehearsals for collapse. A Subaru WRX tears through a track collaged from 3D-scanned willow leaves, a topological terrain partly airborne, partly submerged. Its engine intones a liturgy skewed toward the indecent. At the core, a sealed chamber offers no comfort, only the rough clarity of noise. The sound is raw, forceful, and exacting. A scratched psalm, a Taoist mischief, a refusal to resolve. The work holds its contradictions close, part sermon, part undoing, drawn toward the edge where language drops out and the body listens.
Artist bio
Tong acts covertly and makes noise. Through playful and seemingly fortuitous ways, he creates objects, moving images and line works, to explore wilderness and absurdity, to research the poetics of paradoxes, and to interfere with reason and rules. Born on Mount Lu, Tong studied geology at China University of Geosciences in Beijing and received his BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University and MFA in Studio Art from New York University. Tong’s work has been recently exhibited at Rockbund Art Museum, By Art Matters Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Today Art Museum, Hessel Museum of Art, MACA Art Center, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Para Site, Vanguard Gallery, and Candice Madey. In 2021, he won the inaugural Choi Foundation Prize for Contemporary Art. Tong serves as an assistant professor at Pratt Institute in New York.
