Hengzhi Gong
- Current MPhil/PhD student
- Arts & Humanities MPhil/PhD
Hengzhi Gong (b. 1995, Chongqing, China) is a painter and researcher living and working in London. He holds a BSc in Industrial Design from the Beijing Institute of Technology (2018) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2020). He got his PhD in Arts and Humanities at the RCA in 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.
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More about Hengzhi
Degrees
2021- Royal College of Art, Arts and Humanities Research
2018-2020 Royal College of Art, Painting
2015-2018 Beijing Institute of Technology, Industrial Design, B.Eng
2012-2015 Beijing Institute of Technology, Information Engineering, B.Eng
Awards
2011 The Second Prize of National Physics Contest
2010 The Third Prize of National Computer Contest
2009 The First Prize of Happy Sunshine Cup Violin Competition
2008 Gold Medal of Alderman Cup Violin Competition
2008 Gold Medal of Alderman Cup Violin Competition
2005 Certificate of Violin National Tenth Grade
Exhibitions
2021 ASYAAF, Gallery LVS & CRAFT, Seoul, Korea
2020 Future Lab, West Bund Museum, Shanghai, China
2020 Wintergreen Boxwood, No. 20 Arts, London, UK
2020 50/50, Fold Gallery, London, UK
2020 Final, Not Over, Unit 1 Gallery, London, UK
2020 Beacon, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, UK
2020 Snapshot, Hockney Gallery, London, UK
2020 IMARA Art Auction, Nottingham High School, Nottingham, UK
2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
2019 Get It For Cheap, Soil Gallery, Seattle, US
2019 Get It For Cheap, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, US
2019 RCA WIP Show, Sackler Building, London, UK
2018 Graduation Show, Gallery of Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
2018 纪念联合国教科文组织民间运动70周年展, Beijing, China
2016 What a Joke, Fruit Space, Chongqing, China