BEN TONG
Idea of North
September 19 - October 31, 2026
Night Gallery is proud to present Idea of North, an exhibition of new paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Ben Tong. This is Tong's second solo exhibition with the gallery, following The Violet Hour. He has also participated in the group exhibitions Rare Earth and Shrubs.
Paintings, for Tong, are not stable objects. They are sensitive surfaces—prone to change through perception and light, alive to the frequencies that move through and around them. Oil paint is especially given to such mutability; mineral pigments redirect the light that passes through, modulating its spectrum while reflecting, refracting, and causing it to slow. In Chinese, the word for landscape is 风景 (fēngjǐng), composed of the characters for “wind” and “view.” This conveys an understanding that any environment is susceptible to motion. Tong's canvases share this quality, often whipping light through his oils like gusts of wind. Shaped by the insistence of Southern California's sun, he conceives of his paintings as already lit: from behind or from within, by something celestial, solar, or born from screens.
Tong's process is as tactile as it is ocular. He works with brushes, rags, and oils, and also a massage gun. The latter pushes paint across the canvas in radial rhythms that cannot be entirely predicted or controlled. This surrender to the material allows the paint to do what it must and will. Tong’s canvases evoke stained glass and wind, a crack in a surface through which something radiant pours. Light bends in and out of portals, jumps across fields of color, contorts. Moons, rainbows, and starlike bursts recur throughout Idea of North. The resulting works appear luminous and layered, pulsing and as charged with feeling as they are with light.
The exhibition's title is borrowed from a 1967 radio documentary by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, an apt reference for an artist who thinks often in frequencies. Light, feeling, waves, invisible signals, the electromagnetic spectrum, radar: Tong considers each ungraspable register as he works. For Tong, paintings are vectors that attract their own forces and are imbued with longing—to arrive at something, to commune, to render the invisible visible within the world.
Rather than working from preconceived concepts, Tong cultivates the ability to hold doubt and suspense. Patiently, he waits for feelings and creative decisions to emerge. In Tong’s work, action begets meaning, not the other way around. The paintings included in Idea of North serve as artworks, yes, but also as transmissions. They are offerings of frequency and presence, a beckoning toward something beyond that can’t quite be named.