In Conversation with Ben Tong

Photo Credit: Tyler Matthew Oyer

Ben Tong (b. 1981, Toronto, Canada) received his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2012. The artist has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at galleries and museums including Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal, Canada; UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies, Santa Barbara, CA; Jack Barrett, New York, NY; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA, and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. His work has been included in group shows at MOCA Geffen, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Bode Projects, Berlin, Germany; K11, Hong Kong; Capsule Shanghai, Shanghai, China; and Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA, among other venues. His work belongs in the collections of TD Bank, JP Morgan, Chase Bank, The Royal Bank of Canada and Morgan Stanley. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

I had the pleasure of asking Ben about what poets he is reading, the origin of his latest exhibition at Night Gallery and so much more.

UZOMAH: How has art helped you navigate life’s challenges?

BEN: I’ve always felt a very persistent internal space. I have this strong desire to cultivate a life that nurtures and protects this space, and that is what has led me to pursue the life of an artist. This inside seeks an outside, and the ways in which it does are ways in which I feel freedom in the world, a kind of attunement. Very generally speaking, life has many challenges to this way of being because the inside and the outside do not always align. When life becomes challenging I try not to see it as an obstacle but as a way of sharpening my skill of tuning in.

Our beloved dog Maggie died this year. It was incredibly sad and painful for me. It reminded me of how this space that I have inside also contains much sadness. I try to channel this into the work, and to feel the facts of the world more deeply inside. I go to the studio and paint every day. I’m very protective of this space and time I have inside the studio. I also try to ask what this inside space wants to tell me about the outside. I’m always directed back to this space and my practice of painting.

Ben Tong 10:55pm, 2026 oil on canvas 66 x 56 in (167.6 x 142.2 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

U: What inspired this exhibition, and what was the theme’s origin?

B: I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that our consciousness is like an antenna, and our body and its senses are this incredibly sensitive instrument that can pick up on all sorts of phenomena. I realized that paintings themselves also act in this way. They are these sensitive surfaces, made through the hand, gestures, pigments, and materials of the artist, that receive something and then transmit something back out into the world.

The title of this exhibition, Idea of North, comes from a radio documentary produced by Glenn Gould. It’s this idea that there is something in our imagination that beckons us, and that within certain individuals this calling is strong enough to make us go to extreme lengths to seek it out. Gould’s narrative involves certain individuals who go north ostensibly to seek isolation but end up finding community with others. It’s told through multiple voices that are braided together. Gould’s radio documentary is structured like a fugue, in a kind of contrapuntal format where something simple becomes complex through time.

I think these paintings all started out with a desire not only to find something, but also to listen to what is being transmitted from my surroundings. Gould is also from Toronto, and having lived and worked in Los Angeles for many years, I find myself thinking about where I grew up. I think that our deep pasts live in our unconscious, like images projected onto the present.

Ben Tong Matter and Memory, 2026 oil on aluminum 19 x 16 in (48.3 x 40.6 cm)

U: Your style blends tension and lived experience. How do you bring these together so the audience can explore both ideas as one?

B: A painting is made up of matter - oil, pigment, mineral, a surface like cotton duck or aluminum. When I start painting, I don’t have an idea of what the end result will look like. As I begin to make marks and washes and build layers of paint, over time the surface and its marks begin to suggest things to me. I’m not sure where these images come from - whether from my unconscious or from the painting itself - but what comes from inside me begins to intertwine with the forms emerging on the surface.

Painting’s mimetic capacity also means that forms from centuries of painting’s history can suddenly appear. A formation of comma-like brush marks can quickly suggest a particular Impressionist painter, or a smear can recall a certain photorealist. I love how quickly a painting can shift how one reads it, and how one can travel through different psychological or material spaces.

Is it the material taking shape on the canvas that “wants” to be in this particular form, or is it me shaping the vision? I’m not quite sure. Each painting has its own process, and I suppose each varies in how much of my own experience gets drawn out and how much of its own materiality remains.

U: What keeps you creating art and staying inspired?

B: Curiosity of the natural world and its phenomena!

Ben Tong The Ascending Aromas, 2026 oil on canvas 48 x 36 in (121.9 x 91.4 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

U: Do other art forms influence your artistic creativity?

B: Yes! Music and dance, cooking and food, floral arranging and photography all influence my output. All these other forms are ways in which tuning into an embodied sensing of the world are important. I also love to play tennis. In a tennis match there’s this great physical and mental grappling that happens. Sometimes you realize the limits of your body, and sometimes it is your mind. But when it all clicks together it is a really beautiful thing.

Ben Tong Matter and Memory, 2026 oil on aluminum 19 x 16 in (48.3 x 40.6 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

U: Is there anything you wish you had learned earlier about being a professional artist?

B: To spend time building the business part of the studio in order to support the creating part. Early on I was not really thinking about this at all. I was working multiple jobs to earn an income to support my studio practice. That changed when I became a full time artist.

I think at first I was resistant to fully engaging the business part of the studio because well to be honest I’m not good at an administrative mindset and I can be a procrastinator. But I’m learning now that in order to protect the wild, free, open and intuitive space of the making I need to really tend to the administrative parts of the practice as well. I’m trying to make spreadsheets, databases, calendars, inventories, to-do-lists, sexy again - for myself!

U: When you know a painting is finished, do you ask yourself anything to confirm it needs no more work?

B: It’s the feeling that I’ve arrived at something, or some things that I’ve been searching for. At the start of a painting process the only thing that I know is that there is something I’m looking for through the process of painting. I don’t know how I’m going to get there but I have this feeling that I want to find something. So it’s this process of making and discovering, and being curious about where the process can take me in each painting.

A lot of paintings get discarded along the way because they can just get all jammed up. You dig and dig and sometimes nothing is there. But sometimes I can find something interesting - a strange shape, a beautiful combination, a fragment of a memory, of an experience. Then I want to preserve this thing. Then I need to stop before I lose it.

I mean it’s also ok if I lose it. I’ve lost many things before, pushed past points in the painting process where I should’ve stopped and have messed it up. This is all part of the thing that excites me about painting. It’s kind of like a form of gambling, you don’t know whether the next card you ask for will bring you fortunes or make you lose everything!

Ben Tong Crown, 2026 oil on aluminum 24 x 30 in (61 x 76.2 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

U: Do you have favorite authors or poets, and what was the last thing you read?

B: I love poems by Wallace Stevens. The last thing I read was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Also this weird thing happened while perusing the bookstore to find what I was going to read next. A book literally flew off the shelf as I walked past it - Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. I took it as a sign that there was something here for me to find out, something the universe wants to tell me here.

Ben Tong Stars Are Falling Tonight, 2026 oil on canvas 66 x 122 in (167.6 x 309.9 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Nik Massey.

U: How can art transform how humans experience things? Do you believe art is a thought process or a way of reasoning through emotions and experiences?

B: I’ve found that for myself when I’ve encountered a work of art that stays with me, it becomes a way in which I can shift my perspective of the world and see through another one. There becomes then not just one, or two, or three, but infinite perspectives from which to see from - it expands our internal spaces not just by volume, but by time and dimension.

In terms of thought, for me at least thought and reasoning are ways to understand what has just happened. I would say that art is more akin to the storm you are witnessing approach while standing on the beach. Of course after when you are at home safe you remember this experience and think about what it means, but in the moment you can’t help but be wonderstruck.

U: What aspect of creating art do you find most challenging?

B: Doubt and uncertainty are the most challenging aspects, but for that same reason, very necessary. For me part of the creation of something is about following a curiosity about where the process is taking me. It is impossible to be curious about something if you already know in advance where it will go.

So curiosity propels, but because the process takes time, along the way there will be doubt and uncertainty. Will I be able to make this painting? Will the show come together? Will I find what I’m looking for, etc. etc. Well at some point I have to also have faith in the process and just believe that it will take me somewhere - that I’ll find some thing.

For more information about Ben’s work please visit his site here. Ben can also be followed on Instagram here. Ben’s exhibtion Idea of North opened on September 19 and will conclude on October 31, 2026 at the Night Gallery. For more information about this exhibtion and more please visit the NIght Gallery’s site here.