Hengzhi Gong
龚恒之

Hengzhi Gong (b. 1995, Chongqing, China) is a painter living and working in London. He holds a BSc in Industrial Design from the Beijing Institute of Technology (2018), an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2020), and a PhD in Arts and Humanities from the Royal College of Art (2025).

Gong's painting depicts black humour narratives in scenes that inhabit a space between realism and surrealism. These works are neither fully surreal nor strictly realist; rather, they occupy an ambiguous position that is at once possible and impossible, tangible yet elusive. They might occur, though perhaps not within the reality we recognise.

Central to Gong's practice is an anxiety about the loss of history, intensified by the fragmented perception of time in the era of postmodernism, where memory and temporality in painting dissolve into fleeting glimpses consumed through internet platforms and social media. His images are melancholic, broken, and fragmentary, standing in opposition to nature, completeness, and optimistic narratives. Thus, they are allegorical, emerging as a form of resistance, a fractured and incomplete reflection that acknowledges historical discontinuities, the impossibility of fully reconstructing the past, and a nostalgia for a time that never truly existed.