Plants have been a recurring theme in Tu Hongtao’s recent works. A dramatic shift in his artistic language makes it appear, on the surface, that the artist has made a break with the past. His earlier dolls, crowds and dramatic stages, with their focused compositions and constrained layouts, directly conveyed a distinct sense of anxiety. These strong sentiments were not only linked to the artist’s life at the time, but also stand as a true portrait of the state of existence of many modern people. If we were to summarize the Tu Hongtao of the time, then the most striking key terms would be “man and society,” and “subject and others.” When he shifted to plants, Tu Hongtao’s artworks became suddenly much more difficult to put into words. One reason for this is the retreat of semantic subjects, along with the abstraction of artistic language: though plants are substantive and recognizable, and there are human figures inserted into many of the works, the direct expression of anxiety and contradiction has receded into the undergrowth. It is no longer the object of depiction but the foundation for gradual growth.

The contemporary nature of Tu Hongtao lies not in a grand narrative or radical criticism. He has his sights set on the unique spiritual state of modern man. This is the thread which runs through his entire creative practice. His time working outside the field of art gave him a personal and total encounter with the “trembling” experience of the city and modernity. The stress and dejection of the need to survive among the rapid human flows of the city left their mark on his works. After revisiting his identity as an artist, this experience did not fade away but instead evolved into a new form of experience, an intellectual alienation and fission. As a product of the spirit, knowledge bestows its creators and users with satisfaction and joy, but it also comes to alter and rule the subject. Religion, a human construct, is aimed at liberation, but it instead constrains human nature, even leading to more conflict on this mortal coil. In the same way, knowledge, a product of spiritual labor, seems to turn around and limit man’s fundamental ability to confront reality. Unable to escape from it and renounce the world, and just as unable to enter into it and engage the world, the modern intellectual slips into the cracks between ideals and reality, pressed between the two, pacing about within the mysterious dualism between spirit and material.

Turning to the artworks, the paintings use powerful visual impact to present similar contradictions. Plants often occupy most of the painting in a wild state marked by a primal power and tenacity that is somewhat offset by marks of withering and defeat. The occasional appearance of the human form assists in these resistant sentiments. Though these figures are based on real life prototypes, here they have been stripped of their social identity, placed within the picture in a murky state. Sometimes they are concealed within the plants’ embrace, almost fused with their surroundings, and sometimes they stand out in the blankness in the corner, gazing back at the tangled, conflicted plants. In the former, man’s alienation has been visualized in a nightmarish spectacle. In the latter, the plants have been liberated from metaphor and transformed into a sweeping background that highlights the marginalization and smallness of the person. Here, the person and the background exist as a dialectical relationship, together alluding to the shared spiritual state of a group.

Though he received rigorous training in Western painting, Tu Hongtao often enjoys drawing nourishment from Chinese traditional culture. In his deep readings of the ancient classics, he came to increasingly lean towards the “literati air” of old, and his works began to reveal balanced contention between unconstrained spontaneity and civilized constraint. Though his images of plants are quite wild, they are not entirely painted with uncontrolled smearing of the brush. The calligraphic brush lines serve to keep the wildness of these plants in check while bestowing the composition with structure and volume, thus “bringing restorative order to decay.” Spatially, Tu Hongtao has chosen the flat layout method unique to Chinese painting, particularly scrolls. The removal of focus and perspective has led to the loss of the normal spatial proportions between objects in the paintings, forming a spatial relationship of both juxtaposition and dispersal. As a result of this technique, the images no longer possess clear diagrammatic qualities. The narrative possibilities have thus been further abstracted, magnifying the proportions of sentiment and perception. In his recent works, this surreal material relationship has grown increasingly apparent. The plants have been stripped of their root base, and float in the upper reaches of the painting, bringing about unexpected absurdity and uncanniness in their rootless state, pointing to drift and unease.

Today, modern man faces confusion in the mortal world, and seeks comfort in nature. Though he has created a plant world, Tu Hongtao has not provided an imaginary paradise. His floral imagery differs from that of classical landscape paintings, which embed the land with emotional content, because his is not some salve of reclusion. The externalization of concepts into nature is what constitutes its comforting properties, just as concepts determine whether knowledge will become sustenance or a yoke. Spirit and material, release or repression, Tu Hongtao has seen the contradiction, and uses the neutral stance of the bystander to describe the conflict. These things, however, do not stop at the presentation of appearance. They will inevitably delve deeper into the core of this opposition, and at that point, these contradictory images will no longer be a commentary on mere modernity, but will finally become commentary on human nature.