2025.8.16 - 2025.10.31
“Lenz and I, taking air with wanning moon”
@Linseed Projects, Shanghai
Installation view
White, white not yet fully filled. Here, white as an over-presence appears not to illuminate but as a space to stage. Vermilion streaks slash toward bruised indigo but veer; ochre smolders toward turquoise and halts. Lines meander in loose tandem; patches ripple like echoes. This is a space that does not contain, but unfolds, through the restless interplay of forms. Foliage? An interior? A skyline? A face? Perhaps. Rather than distinct compositions, figures take shape as living tessellations, woven from the rhythms of emergence and dissolution. Neither fully grounded nor ethereal, a brushstroke in Mengtong’s work is less an employment of technique than a pulse; a smudge of color is less an image than a trace that outlasts its cause, as if the act of looking might scatter.
Abyssal and immediate, the spatial void alternately pulls the eye into an infinite depth and surges forward, forcing every mark to assert itself with desperate clarity. It declares how form is not merely what is seen, but what is withheld. Yet this forming void exiles, flooding the scene with a light that exposes every failed connection. It is a ghost of what could have been, charged with the tension of hesitation, the echo of withdrawal: the hand that suspended. Mengtong does not depict disconnection; she enacts its very structure through the shuddering rhythm of approach and avoidance. Just as a comma splice creates tension by forcing clauses into uneasy proximity, rifts between forms generate a kind of visual friction thrumming with the electricity of discontinuity. What emerges is a visual stutter that bypasses the meaning of words, a deafening silence that lodges directly in the skull.
The illuminated is a vision that has come unstitched. At the core of Mengtong’s work lies this disconnection and rupture, where distance does not tear but tie, boundaries do not demarcate but dissolve. Left is distanced from the right, red distanced from blue, now from then, object from subject, you from me, Lenz from ‘I.’ Yet without left, there is no right; without past, no present; without another body, no body; without Lenz, no I. What remains is an endless doubling: a left to the left, a past to the past, an I to I. The double is neither copy nor original, but the tremor between them where the certainty of boundaries becomes their own unraveling. This is the intimacy of dissolution: a wound, in its most naked state. To be open is to be flayed; to be exposed is to be vulnerable. Mengtong’s practice lingers in the most precarious, drifting along at the threshold of connection.
*The exhibition title derives from Mengtong's sustained engagement with Georg Büchner’s 1836 novella- fragment Lenz. The figure is an enduring presence throughout her practice, one that both haunts and accompanies her work and rumination. It draws specifically from the line: “[...], as though in a dream to take into oneself each being within nature as flowers take in air with the waxing and the waning of the moon." (from Complete plays, Lenz and other writings, 1993 Penguin edition, translated by John Reddick, p.203).