Gong Zhanlei was born in 1989 in Hengshui, Hebei province. He graduated from the Experimental Art Institute of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2017 and received a Master ‘s degree in Integrated Visual Arts.

Gong Zhanlei’s practice, in which drawing and painting operate less as descriptive media than as instruments of psychic calibration, technologies for locating stillness within conditions of pressure, excess, and historical drift. Across bodies of work that move from rigorous black-and-white pencil compositions to recent canvases that interlace collage and paint, Gong posits image-making as a form of disciplined interior labor: a slow reordering of affect, a self-redemptive praxis enacted through material decisions that refuse immediacy.

The early monochrome series establishes a foundational lexicon. Gong’s insistence on black and white does not reduce the world; rather, it concentrates it. Monochrome becomes a total field, “all-pervading and rich”, where intimacy and severity cohabit, and where the simplest tonal shifts carry the weight of lived contradiction. The works stage an ontological tension between the legible and the unruly: a surface that appears controlled yet is continuously threatened by the pressure of what cannot be named. In this sense, complexity is not an aesthetic effect but a lived condition; the drawing is a site where chaos is neither illustrated nor denied, but gradually metabolized into composure.

This inquiry deepens in the recent canvases, where collage introduces a vernacular archive: business cards, postal cards, and other remnants that index social exchange and the passage of time. Such fragments function as minor documents—evidence of what is vanishing from everyday visibility, yet they resist nostalgia. Incorporated into painterly structure, they form a bridge between present and past, insisting that history is not a distant narrative but an active substrate shaping perception in the now.

Running through these material negotiations is Gong’s return to the “Four Gentlemen”, lotus, orchid, plum, chrysanthemum, motifs historically revered within literati culture. Here, however, the symbols are not revived as quotation. They are subjected to a contemporary spatial problem: an exploration of verticality through side profiles, layered and segmented, as if tradition itself were being reoriented in cross-section, made structural, modular, and endlessly recomposable. Gong’s works ultimately argue that tranquility is not a given state but a constructed horizon: from visual dazzle, a measured calm; from confusion, a method; from time’s erosion, a renewed capacity to see.