August 3-October 30, 2023 — Visual Arts

Nationality: China
Residency location: Basel
Partner organization: Amerbach Studio

Tong Wenmin’s artworks often focus on where individual perception intersects with the external environment, stimulating visual poetry, and inspiring action through behaviors that at first seem counter-intuitive. Through often simplified or regulated movements, her works hint at the body’s allegorical character and action within a semantically rich context. Her recent practice zooms in and captures the every day ruins in China’s rapid urbanization. These ruins happen in the present, exist temporarily, are repurposed after their decay, or even transformed in the ever-changing environment.

Since the Zhongliang Village Project, Tong Wenmin internalized the impressions of ruins from her personal experiences and embarked on various discussions. The works of this project span across many art mediums, including video art, on-site performance, installation, and painting, and extending the study into other dimensions such as architecture, literature, existentialism, emotions, memories, consumption, and spirituality. To further this project, Tong Wenmin plans to visit various areas of the world in 2021, and initiate comparative research among them. For her residency, Tong Wenmin wishes to visit institutions and individuals who are engaged in the performance, theatre, dance or related topics, through which to gain an understanding on the regional differences between China and Switzerland on culture, economics, and the natural environment, where she would begin her research and reflection on these disparities.

Tong Wenmin, born in 1989 in Chongqing, China, where she currently works and lives. She received her BFA at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2012. She won the Grand Jury Prize of Huayu Youth Award in 2018, the First Prize of the 8th New Star Art Award in 2018, the Accolade Artist by Documentaries of Chinese Performance Art in 2016. Her recent solo exhibitions include Emerald, WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China (2019), Escape from Discipline, Thousand Plateau Art Space, Chengdu, China (2019), Above The Tree, Organhaus Art Space, Chongqing, China (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Sunset on a Dead End: The Notorious and Their Inexplicable Modes of Existence, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai, China (2019).