Tong Kunniao: Why Don't You Eat Stinky Tofu?

Nicodim Gallery is pleased to announce “Why Don’t You Eat Stinky Tofu?,” the US debut exhibition of new paintings, kinetic sculptures and installations by Tong Kunniao (b. 1990) aka T.K.. The exhibition will be on view from September 10 through October 22, 2016.

T.K. grew up in the city of Changsha where stinky tofu, like malodorous Epoisse cheese, is regarded as THE culinary delicacy, favored by locals. The stinky tofu is not for the faint of heart, inasmuch as the artist’s works can be both challenging and rewarding.

Assembled with secondhand tchotchkes and found objects, enforced with cheap construction materials, powered by simple motors, and installed cheek by jowl, T.K.’s totem-pole-like vertical kinetic sculptures occupy the gallery in clusters, some elevated on pedestals of various heights and some placed directly on the floor. The Barbie dolls, action figures, carnival masks, leftover garments, furniture fragments, adult toys, and religious souvenirs are botched, mounted on poles or dangled in the air. When the motion sensors are tripped, the sculptures are set in wild rotating and flinging dances, accompanied by blinking lights and rattling sounds. The idiosyncratic, colorful, dense, and erotic works confront the viewer with the embarrassing, the shameful, the uneasy, but ultimately the harmless pranks that hilariously depict despicable bodily functions and social humiliations. A wooden granny puppet’s arm is repeatedly swinging upward hitting a pair of testicles. A few dozens of Barbies and Kens are nailed to a board, arranged according to their skin colors from pale to dark. A long rat-tail is swirling madly in the air, beating a tambourine erected on top of an archipelago of sculptures, as if summoning a ritual ceremony. Silicone turds are casually placed throughout the gallery. Blood is represented everywhere, reflecting the artist’s initial emotional response to Los Angeles before his arrival. News and social media have bombarded the world with images of mass shooting, police violence, and deadly crimes in Los Angeles. Needless to say, without having previously experienced Los Angeles, T. K.’s imagination of the city of angels is stained with blood. The special reference to blood seems to offer up Tristan Tzara’s theater of suffering.

Having worked everyday on site since August 1, 2016, the artist gradually appropriates the gallery space through his “messy” display of half-torn dry walls, accumulated objects, slapdash paintings, and cacophonous sculptures, all partially or entirely made of discarded and recyclable materials from the detritus of consumer society in Beijing and Los Angeles. Engaging consumers’ refuse with low mechanic technology, and subjecting the outcome to contingency, the 25-year old artist from Beijing gives a nod to ancestries in art history, from Dada to Fluxus to Arte Povera, from Jean Tinguely to Robert Rauschenberg to Mike Kelley. Guided by the DIY attitude, his artistic language has developed through his relentless editing and re-editing by hand fragments and residues of information, images and objects, and amalgamating them into three-dimensional combines that extend vertically and horizontally in the space. Accentuated with spray paint, strobe light, and fog effects, the installation of vernacular and domestic junk conjures up dystopian ruins and apocalyptic chaos that thereby pose questions about the history of a place, be it Los Angeles or Beijing, and its people, as well as the way in which elements constitute the space as the event of our time. 

However, T.K. is neither complaining about the modern days’ soulless banality nor trying to escape from the material world. Instead, he argues for a thrift-store aesthetic of redemption and irony-drenched celebration of decline and nostalgia, while embracing the adolescent humor and libidinal gratification.