Tong Kunniao, born in 1990 in Changsha, Hunan Province, graduated from the Third Studio of the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. Since 2015, Tong Kunniao has maintained a frequency of at least one solo exhibition per year, appearing in various parts of China, Germany, the United States and France.
Tong Kunniao specialises in art in a variety of media, including performance, sculpture, painting, photography and installation. His most famous artwork, the Balancing Bird series of art installations, even incorporates traditional Chinese realistic painting. However, installation art is Tong Kunjiao's main form of creation, and he considers all his artworks to be an extension of installation art. During his university years, Tong was the president of the Environmental Protection Club, and his experience in environmental protection activities inspired him to pay attention to and think about objects and materials themselves. Starting with his graduation artwork Sagittarius, Tong has constantly resorted to material installations to understand the existence of materials/objects and the way human beings exist.
Tong Kunniao's artwork is full of imagery of the "balance" between people and objects. He is not satisfied with the "balance" of contemporary society, which is characterised by the proliferation of consumerism and the monopoly of fetishism. For his solo exhibition Golden Dystopia on Three Millimeters in 2021, Tong Kunniao painted Balancing Bird with gold paint, satirising the vulgarity of human desire for objects and their alienation from human beings. Through the Balancing Bird series of art installations, Tong Kunniao demonstrates that individual human status and space are always subject to the invisible pressures and limitations of social structures.
As a post-90s artist, Tong Kunniao's artwork has a humour and absurdity that belongs to the younger generation. He strategically dismantles, reconstructs and repeatedly makes different materials to create a sense of contradiction and to break down common perceptions. With ART TRASH, the world's largest rubbish artwork, Tong Kunniao shows the world after human desire has been exhausted. He also depicts his installations with traditional Chinese realistic painting as "installation landscape paintings" (Wishful Thinking Never Takes the Bait, 2018). The contradiction and sense of void created by the modern installation and ancient painting, blankness and fullness, prompt the viewer to use their imagination to fill in the blanks and create their own "balance".