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 rosemary, fragments of bone, and tiny unnamed flowers slowly gather into diamonds that seem about to close. Cong says these forms arise unintentionally, as does the black hole-like space surrounding the dewdrops in Morning Dew. These enclosed spaces or caves offer the warmth of being enfolded, yet also the distance of being set apart: as before birth, as after the end.

Futile Effort was the last work completed for this exhibition. It had been set aside for some time because of the blank area in the upper right of the canvas. Cong kept feeling that something ought to be born there. After a while, she saw, in that empty space, a white sheep giving birth to a black one. Only then did she lay down her brush. These small, seemingly incidental things take on a strangeness in her paintings, forming fragile connections under a gaze that verges on the religious. So it is with the pilgrimage path in Futile Effort, paved with shells of different shapes that hover in and out of view. A journey of faith that draws closer to truth, step by step, is like the stone that Sisyphus takes up again each time it rolls back down. For Cong, the daily labour of painting is also, through repetition, a form of arrival and approach. Futile effort is itself both the outcome and the purpose: the firmest present within the unknown of the future.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What does a person gain from all the toil at which they labour under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2–3)

Even Solomon sometimes doubted the meaning of toil. Yet “what is has already been, and what is to come has been before; and what has passed is brought back again.” Before nature and life, do we not, too, hold on in awe to these days and nights, to the birds and the grass?

Text by Esther Sun