Artist to Watch: Ben Tong Uses a Cool Palette with Unexpected Bursts to Create Powerful Paintings
The innovative painter will star in a solo show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles beginning September 19
Frequently artists begin their creative journeys with drawing and painting, later expanding to sculpture, moving images, and other complex forms. But not Ben Tong—he started his practice with video, installations, and photography, then proceeded to one of the more traditional mediums. “I was interested in the sensual aspects of art making, the materiality of it,” says the Toronto native, who has called Los Angeles home since he went to the California Institute of the Arts, receiving a master’s degree in 2012. “I love painting for its flexibility and freedom.”
The resulting works are typically rendered in a cool palette of blues, purples, and greens interrupted by bursts of white—a contrast that appeals to him. “When light emerges from that darker ground, it’s quite powerful,” says Tong, who has a solo show at Night Gallery in L.A. from September 19 to October 31. A few pieces have engaged with hotter colors, such as the swirling oranges in Wind Scene, a work in the exhibition that Tong says may have been inspired by the desert landscape of the area around Joshua Tree National Park, where he has a house.
The paintings are semi-figurative, with identifiable subjects, such as 10:55pm, a canvas in the show that depicts flowers as viewed through a sheer-covered window. Yet they often have striations, which make the images seem like a remembrance that is somehow being pulled away from the viewer’s grasp. The mottled, layered surfaces recall a wonky, fuzzy television transmission from an earlier era. Tong leans into this idea of multiple iterations—that this rendition is a few steps from the original, and the image gets distorted along the way (charmingly so, in his hands). “It’s like the memory of a screen,” he says.
Tong applies paint with any tool at his disposal—brushes, rags, and even the Theragun that he would normally use to soothe his tennis-sore muscles. “The way that I paint, it’s less to do with planning and knowing what the image is in advance,” he says. Relinquishing that kind of control takes a certain amount of courage, but as an artist Tong has done all the preparation that allows luck to strike.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Fall Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.