Tony WONG 1970–1980: A World Drawn Together by Lines

I. A World Yet to Arrive: The Origin of Life in the Fissures

Looking back on Tony WONG’s life trajectory, it becomes clear that from the very beginning it was never grounded in a stable, transparent, or readily intelligible world. Born in Guangdong in 1948, his life began amid one of the most turbulent periods in modern Chinese history: the final phase of the Chinese Civil War, the Land Reform Movement, the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the People’s Communes, and the Great Leap Forward. These historical forces were not distant fragments of a grand narrative; they penetrated deeply into everyday life, operating as immediate realities capable of altering one’s fate at any moment. In this context, the world was not experienced as landscape, geography, or culture, but as a succession of external forces forcibly intervening in life itself.

As a major hub of South China, Guangdong maintained long-standing and complex connections with overseas Chinese communities. Local imaginaries of the world were often shaped by word-of-mouth accounts of “Gold Mountain”—an external world that was at once real and mythologized. Yet this world remained inaccessible, enveloped in a haze formed by political restrictions, sealed borders, and the controls of social class. For a young boy, the perception of the world was therefore not one of openness, but of absence, fragmentation, and glimpses caught through fissures. Thus, in Tony WONG’s eyes, the world may never have appeared as an already existing scene. The “world” embedded in his lived experience was never stable: it was cut apart by politics, battered by socioeconomic forces, and reshaped by language and class. It offered neither a secure life nor clear direction, nor sufficient space to accommodate a complete individual subject. Growing up under such conditions profoundly shaped his visual language. From this point onward begins the extension of the lines in Tony WONG’s painting.

In many of Tony WONG’s works, bodies within the image are rarely placed upon stable ground. Instead, figures are caught in states of tumbling, imbalance, running, falling, or leaping. These postures are neither theatrical nor narrative; they are direct extensions of his early lived reality—a world that offered no safe position, no logic, no center. In other words, in Tony WONG’s life, the world never existed prior to perception. The world was not given; it was something one was compelled to experience first through the body.

For this reason, the exhibition adopts “A World Drawn Together by Lines” as its subtitle. This is not a metaphor. Rather, it describes how, in Tony WONG’s practice, the world never precedes the lines on the page. The world comes into being at the other end of the line—it is drawn together, summoned into existence, by line itself.

II. Migrating Bodies: Leaving Is Not an Action, but a Destiny

To understand the ceaseless, seemingly unplaceable bodies in Tony WONG’s work, we must return to the longue durée of migration linking South China, Hong Kong, and the United States. For people from Guangdong, “leaving” has never been merely a personal choice; it is a condition shaped by profound historical forces. Since the nineteenth century, the image of “Gold Mountain”[1] has circulated in Guangdong as a transgenerational myth. Under political constraint and economic hardship, it evolved into a collective psychological structure: beyond lay a world that might change one’s fate, while the homeland often signified suffocation, repression, or insurmountable class barriers. In the nineteenth century, Hong Kong served as the principal gateway and transit hub for Chinese heading toward “Gold Mountain.” From the 1960s to the 1970s, large-scale emigration from Guangdong passed through Hong Kong. For these migrants, Hong Kong was not a destination but a “temporarily existing place of pause”—a suspended city situated between colonial governance, Cold War politics, and the shadow of China. For new migrants, life was not about settlement but about waiting for the next opportunity to move; identity was not established but forced to find provisional footing amid shifting borders.

Seen from this perspective, the bodies in Tony WONG’s artistic practice are never fixed: running, leaping, stretching, escaping. These gestures constitute an ontology—a visual reflection of a life condition that cannot remain still. In the context of migration, the world does not stand on your side. You must move first. When the environment cannot provide stability, you are compelled to use your own body to search for boundaries; faced with an unknown future, you can only step forward.

In other words, the actions in Tony WONG’s drawings are not character-driven behaviors but closer to instincts of survival. These bodies are not simply drawn; they are propelled by a historical momentum that exceeds the individual. The backgrounds he renders likewise bear the traits of migratory life: blurred, indeterminate, like a misty echo of the mind. They are not empty, but worlds not yet fully formed. For migrants, the world is not a concrete landscape; it is more like successive expanses of ocean awaiting comprehension. From this angle, Tony WONG does not use painting to document an era; rather, through line, he records how migratory life experiences the world. Each line resembles the intake and release of breath, registering how the body is compelled to find its direction within the world.

Diaspora is not history; it is a condition of the body. Here, his work poses a deeper question: when a person cannot remain in any single place in the world, in what way does the body exist?

III. Arrival Is Not the End: America as a Regenerative Field of the World

The United States of the 1970s was not the endpoint promised by immigrant mythologies, but a cultural field marked by intense conflict. The civil rights movement, anti–Vietnam War protests, feminism, sexual liberation, youth rebellion, social movements, and the impact of multiculturalism converged with the freedoms associated with America’s advanced development and civilization—making freedom itself a site of contradiction and tension.

What Tony WONG encountered was a form of “relative freedom,” yet one that could not be immediately understood—a labyrinthine America where individual liberty coexisted with institutional conflict, cultural plurality with identity categorization, and avant-garde art with marketization. For a new immigrant without linguistic advantage, cultural capital, or social security, freedom was not liberation but a renewed casting into another corner. It was precisely in this “corner” that his painting could develop. When Tony WONG began to create in the United States, he was unburdened by academic art training and unbound by inherited traditions. He neither needed to extend Chinese art history nor conform to mainstream American artistic languages. Positioned outside the boundary, he gained a unique—though hardly comfortable—space: the freedom to invent a language from scratch, to begin anew in constructing a world of his own existence.

His manuscripts reveal that the lines in his sketches do more than describe or outline; they function as a kind of “instrument for measuring the world.” Through line, he tests the world’s rhythms, gravity, bodies, directions, and the ways a world unfolds on the page. One might say that Tony WONG was not depicting America; rather, he was recreating his own world within America. He rarely responded directly to America itself, instead addressing the question of how the world is reorganized.

Here, Tony WONG’s lines are not merely expressions of force; they are the foundations of world-making. The body is no longer just a pose but a node through which the world is drawn together; the image is no longer narrative but the grammar of the world itself. America did not provide answers—it provided questions. Tony WONG’s response may well be found in the lines of these sketches. What they present is not a formal choice but a mode of existence: a way of resisting chaos, of attempting to grasp the rhythms of the world and to establish one’s own position within it.

In the 1970s–80s, the American art world debated the question of “how art becomes a world,” a discourse shaped by conceptual art’s interrogation of materiality, minimalism’s challenge to emotion and narrative, and body and performance art’s redefinition of creative boundaries. Tony WONG was not a member of these movements, yet his thinking resonates with them: “art does not represent the world; it is a way of creating the world.” This positioned him as both marginal and singular within the American art field—marginal and singular because he belonged to no dominant language, directing his practice instead toward a deeper question: “how the world can be begun again within the image.” For Tony WONG, America was less a destination than an experimental site for creation—an arena not only for negotiating identity, but for the practical generation of an entirely new worldview.

IV. Parallel to Art History: Parallel Lines That Resist Classification

To understand Tony WONG’s position within the American art landscape of the 1970s–80s, we must first consider how mainstream criticism and institutional systems of the time categorized artists. American art history has tended to organize its scenes through clearly defined schools and styles: the figurative expressionism of the Chicago School; the cool logic of post-minimalism and conceptual art in New York; and the California School’s exploration of light and spatial relations. These discursive frameworks provided tools for identifying artists, yet they also excluded those who did not belong to any established grammar. Tony WONG was precisely one of these figures.

The reason lies in the fact that he was not making aesthetic choices in the conventional sense. For critics of the time to understand his work, they would have had to place it within a recognizable framework—but Tony WONG’s practice resisted such framing. It was not a specific school, but an independent ontology of world-making. He ran parallel to the dominant artistic currents of his time, not because his work fell outside their stylistic parameters, but because he was addressing an altogether different set of questions. He overturned concerns with formal variation, the deconstruction of language, or the redefinition of materiality, confronting instead the philosophical and ontological undercurrents of the question: how does a world come into being? This parallel mode of existence set him on an independent trajectory.

Even so, during the 1970s–80s Tony WONG received support and exhibition invitations from several American galleries. The reason was that his work attracted viewers through a quality that defied classification. The running, tumbling, colliding bodies in his images are not objects of depiction; they resemble primordial forces at the very moment a world is taking shape. This force is at once unfamiliar and familiar, abstract yet figurative, making the work difficult to ignore. Seen from today’s vantage point, this is precisely his most valuable contribution—and the key to this exhibition’s re-positioning of his practice. His work is neither a footnote to any particular movement nor a branch of an art-historical trend, but a creative system born from migratory life and the conditions of existence themselves.

V. Three Stages of World Formation: A World Theory of Pastel, Oil Painting, and Sculpture

One of the most striking characteristics of Tony WONG’s practice is his frequent use of a single sketch or image as the basis for three distinct forms: pastel, oil painting, and sculptural works shaped with oil paint. These are often assumed to be instances of “serial development” or “formal variation,” yet the relationship among these three media runs far deeper than a change of form. They represent the generation of a world across three different levels of existence. From the initial pastel to the final sculpture, this is not a sequence of experiments, but a complete genealogy through which a world moves from perception, to condensation, to existence.

(1) Pastel: The First Layer of World Formation

The speed, friction, and immediacy of pastel produce an intense overlay of lines. These lines do not delineate forms; rather, they resemble the prelude to a world beginning to tremble, on the verge of taking shape. Pastel works often feature loose color blocks, direct momentum, and figures not yet fixed, but pulled, propelled, and summoned. Pastel functions like a world’s first breath. At this stage, the world has not yet acquired a concrete contour; it is determined by the direction, velocity, and rhythm of thinking energy. What we see in the pastel is the force of figures coming into being, and the pulse of space just before it is drawn together.

(2) Oil Painting: The Second Layer of World Formation

Through the layering and luminosity of oil paint, the world begins to coalesce. Figures are no longer merely parts of the image; they begin to possess a sense of “weight.” Backgrounds shift from vagueness to fields charged with thrust and tension. Here, line yields to the properties of the medium, yet continues to work with pigment to structure a world. In this phase, Tony WONG employs layering, scraping, and accretion to create a tactile sensation of a world that is forming but not yet stable. As a result, his oil paintings resemble neither traditional figuration nor the expressive outpouring of expressionism; they register instead the process by which a world gradually acquires existence through material form.

(3) Sculpture: The Third Layer of World Formation

His few oil-paint sculptures are not simply three-dimensional forms; rather, they materialize line and matter breaking out of the pictorial plane. In sculpture, line delineates space, movement becomes weight, and material turns into something physically tangible. Sculpture is not a direct translation of the two-dimensional image, but the moment when the planar world begins to “resist” its own flatness. It is akin to a composite of the world as seen through Tony WONG’s eyes—growing from the plane and plunging into the three-dimensional reality of lived space. His oil-paint sculptures retain a sense of linear fluidity; even in three dimensions, they feel as if they might move in the next instant, escaping their momentary solidification. They are not static objects, but moments temporarily frozen.

Thus, pastel, oil painting, and sculpture do not constitute a cycle of media, but a process of world formation. Tony WONG is creating a way for a world to be born; the media are merely three stages in that becoming. What we witness is how a world, drawn together from its most primordial lines, is gradually transformed into a visible and tangible existence.

VI. Lines Drawing the World Together: Re-reading Tony WONG’s Contemporaneity

In contemporary society, the conditions we face—unstable identities, cultural dislocation, the continual reconfiguration of world orders—resonate deeply with the structures of the world depicted in Tony WONG’s work. We live in a process marked by fluid identities, constantly redefined national boundaries, intensifying global exchange and confrontation, and even the absence of a single answer to the question of what “the world itself” is.

From this vantage point, Tony WONG’s work of the 1970s–1980s is not merely a chapter in art history; it appears instead as a prescient sensitivity to the state of the world, articulated half a century in advance. The re-presentation of his sketch manuscripts thus acquires particular significance, allowing viewers to perceive in these materials not figurative narratives, but a dynamic and universal worldview: a world that is not stable, but generated beyond expectation through oscillation and rupture.

The exhibition “Tony WONG 1970–1980: A World Drawn Together by Lines” does not seek to return him to history, but to re-position the value of his art from the perspective of the present. It aims to reveal how he summoned the world through line, how he inscribed migratory life through a grammar of the body, and how he created an integrated world system grounded in his own lived experience. This becomes an opportunity for reflexive inquiry: when former world orders are no longer secure, how can art begin again? If we start from Tony WONG’s lines, perhaps the responses are already there—in their randomness, extension, aggregation, and solidification, and in the world that ultimately takes shape. Through this, we are reminded once more that art does not depict the world; it is a method of making the world.

Tony WONG does not provide answers. He offers lines and what those lines draw together is not an image, but the world itself.