About TONG

My work begins before language—in a field of sensation, instinct, and bodily awareness. Form arrives slowly, not as a fully imagined image, but as a movement emerging through material. Working primarily with ceramic sculpture, I approach clay as a responsive presence rather than a passive medium. Gravity, moisture, pressure, and time guide each decision, and my hands follow the internal logic of the material instead of imposing a fixed design. Each curve, collapse, or warped edge becomes a record of negotiation—a moment when something invisible briefly takes form.

I think of material not as something I control, but as something that thinks with me. Clay carries geological memory; glaze behaves like a condensed natural force, melting, pooling, and drifting across surfaces. Rather than pursuing precision or finish, I’m interested in momentum—the sense that the material is already moving somewhere, and my role is to respond. Pressing, carving, stretching, or allowing collapse becomes a shared motion between body and matter. The resulting forms often feel found rather than constructed, like artifacts excavated from an interior terrain.

That interior terrain—my dreamworld—sits at the center of my practice. Dreams collapse abstraction into the personal. Even when one seeks clarity or structure, dreams respond with fragments: sensations, emotional residue, and unresolved impressions. My sculptures operate in a similar way. While they may begin from questions of structure, material behavior, or spatial tension, they inevitably draw these concerns back into a psychic landscape shaped by memory and perception. What persists is not narrative, but atmosphere—states of feeling that hover between the real and the imagined.

My understanding of stillness is rooted in bodily perception formed during childhood, before I had language to name experience. Certain environments—submerged spaces, softly lit interiors, places designed for pause rather than action—left lasting impressions not as images, but as emotional states. These early sensations continue to shape my approach to clay, allowing form, emptiness, and light to carry meaning without narrative. In this way, material becomes a vessel for quiet awareness rather than representation.

My sculptural forms do not develop from a single center or blueprint. Instead, they grow through multiple directions at once, where lines extend until they become surfaces, and surfaces soften back into openings. Connections form without hierarchy, allowing one passage to lead unpredictably into another. This non-linear structure resists fixed categorization, functioning instead as a field of relations—where form remains open, porous, and continuously negotiated.

I understand my work through a polyphonic structure. Form establishes the first voice: clay shaped by pressure, gravity, and bodily gesture. Light introduces a second voice, moving across interior surfaces, slipping through openings, and producing shifting shadows. These voices do not resolve into a single meaning; instead, they coexist in tension. As viewers move around the work, their bodies activate another layer of perception, completing a dialogue that remains open rather than unified.

My sensitivity to atmosphere develops through ceramic processes themselves. Color, surface, and spatial depth emerge through firing, glazing, and material response rather than representation. Soft chromatic shifts, pooled glaze, and subtle tonal variation allow the work to carry emotional temperature without imagery. In this way, ceramic form becomes a site where atmosphere is held materially, not described.

My practice is closely tied to subconscious processes, allowing form to emerge through alternation rather than intention alone. High-fire conditions introduce slumping, distortion, and unexpected shifts that I do not attempt to fully control. These unpredictable transformations—random, spontaneous, and sometimes disruptive—are essential to the work. Through this process, functional references are often subverted: vessels lose stability, openings become unusable, and concrete objects drift toward something unreal. What remains is not utility, but a heightened state of presence, where material uncertainty becomes a site for subconscious articulation.

My current porous sculptures extend this approach. Tall, rising structures twist and open as if shaped by internal currents rather than external force. Openings function less as windows and more as passages—formed through pressure and release rather than carving alone. While the work may recall shells, coral, or eroded geological forms, these references remain secondary to the experience of transformation caught mid-process.

Surface plays a critical role in this transformation. Through layered applications of slip, underglaze, and high-fire glazes, surfaces accumulate like emotional geology. Fingerprints, stress marks, and pooled glaze remain visible, holding the memory of each touch and decision. The work resists the idea of completion, appearing instead as something that has lived through time.

In illuminated works, the sculpture shifts again. Light activates the interior, casting moving shadows that animate the form from within. These pieces are not conceived as functional objects; light operates as a research tool, revealing internal flow, negative space, and perceptual movement. The object becomes both container and organism, its inner space suddenly visible and alive.

Across my practice, transformation operates as a condition rather than a theme—material, psychic, and emotional. I am drawn to moments when one state becomes another: solid into fluid, structure into collapse, memory into sensation. The studio becomes a site of negotiation, where material instinct, personal memory, and subconscious impulse converge.

Ultimately, my work searches for sensitivity—a moment when matter and mind acknowledge their shared pulse. When a sculpture feels alive, holding tension between clarity and mystery, I know it is complete. Not because it resolves meaning, but because it sustains transformation.

If material has a language, then each sculpture becomes a brief sentence—a fragment of the dreamworld made tangible, where clay remembers pressure, light behaves as a moving presence, and personal memory dissolves into form.