This is artist Cong’s first solo exhibition at CLC Gallery Venture. She recently moved her studio to the ancient town of Lili in Suzhou, into a courtyard house built of grey brick and roof tiles more than a century ago. From the living rooms of longtime residents along the canals and the soybean paste left out to ferment in the sun, to this neatly ordered courtyard with its trees planted years ago, a world unfolds around her. Through a wooden window, a corner of the courtyard comes into view. It is here that Cong paints and lives.

I never saw a Moor—

I never saw the Sea—

Yet know I how the Heather looks

And what a Billow be.

I never spoke with God

Nor visited in Heaven—

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the Checks were given—

Emily Dickinson

The typhoons and torrential rains of the south have just passed, leaving the air heavy with moisture. Cong’s work always brings Emily Dickinson’s poetry to mind. This reclusive poet wrote in her garden of snakes, spiders, flies, and blades of grass, as well as death, solitude, love, and faith. At home, Cong paints the snails found everywhere around her, the dandelions spreading across the ground, and the leaves and branches of perilla and loquat. Both have consciously chosen a measure of retreat, reaching all things and the world beyond through their perception of an inner world. The animals and plants in Cong’s paintings carry a sense of chance, yet also of resolve, much like the forceful lines she draws against the current. Their forms gradually emerge as the eye discerns and pauses. These chance encounters in daily life, these things heard, fade away and leave traces anew, like the coffee left over from the morning.

Closed diamond-shaped structures recur in Cong’s paintings. A ring of ro......