On those cicada-filled summer days, the collision of colorful marbles, the sweetness of vegetable cream, the delicate folds of paper cranes… A childhood bathed in golden hues and endless sunlight seems to remain eternally imprinted within our collective memory. Before the arrival of an era defined by excessive visibility and the constant documentation of social media, we may have been “the last generation to experience an indistinct childhood.”
In 1994, Jiang Wen adapted Wang Shuo’s novella Fierce Animals (Dongwu Xiongmeng) into the film In the Heat of the Sun. Set against the memories of Beijing’s courtyard compound youth, the original novel constructs a narrative of adolescent desire, friendship, conflict, and fantasy. Jiang Wen further intensified the ambiguity between reality and recollection, allowing the summer afternoons, the shifting shadows of the hutongs, and the unspoken emotions of adolescence to gradually soften—and gradually distort—through the filtering passage of time.
Shanghai 1990 - 1994 ©️Courtesy the photographers: Andrew Holbrooke, Patrick Aventurier, Lu Jie, Peter Charlesworth
Tong Mo’s paintings appear to pursue a similar reconstruction of these fragmented moments. The most beautiful things in life are rarely the most accurate representations of reality; rather, they exist within a certain state of deliberate “out-of-focus.” Walter Benjamin once described this sensation through the concept of “aura.” Within this framework, Tong Mo preserves memory precisely within its uncertainty, creating a blurred distance between ourselves and the past—a distance that can never be fully reproduced, yet remains forever emotionally present.
I. The First Generation of Consumer Childhood
If the adolescents in In the Heat of the Sun lived through a period when social structures were being reconstructed, then those who grew up in the 1990s and around the turn of the millennium experienced a different kind of transformation—an era in which the material world itself was being redefined. During this period, urban spaces, family structures, patterns of consumption, and media experiences were all undergoing profound changes, and childhood itself became one of the most deeply reshaped realms of modernization.
Tong Mo
Water Game, 2025
Oil on canvas
160h x 120w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
The early 1990s witnessed the simultaneous emergence of housing reform, the transformation toward a market economy, and the rise of consumer culture, together reshaping the everyday structure of Chinese households. The childhood objects repeatedly appearing in Tong Mo’s paintings represent the moment when consumer culture first entered the realm of childhood—the “historical scene” in which we collectively witnessed a particular era gradually taking shape through the forces of modernization. Japanese animation, VCD players, electronic pets, McDonald’s, home video cameras… These objects, which now appear entirely ordinary, carry a strong sense of dreamlike nostalgia when recalled today. They were not merely consumer products, but also portals through which an entire generation first imagined the possibilities of future life.
Tong Mo
Green 8-Bamboo, 2025
Oil on canvas
89h x 108w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
This is precisely what makes the specific objects in Tong Mo’s paintings so compelling. Modernization, once a grand social narrative, was transformed into an everyday experience that could be touched, observed, and lived within ordinary family spaces. These objects point toward a vanished era, yet they preserve the vibrant moment when that era was still unfolding. Through them, we experienced something unprecedentedly tangible: the world was changing, and the future was drawing closer.
II. Mémoire Involontaire
Born into the age of smartphones, Generation Alpha appears to possess a complete visual archive of childhood. Photographs, videos, and social media collectively document every stage of their growth. Yet the childhood depicted in Tong Mo’s works exists more like a scene glimpsed through mist—preserving only certain intimate “key frames” of personal experience. The artist’s own family albums contain only a handful of images, while the video camera was activated only occasionally, usually during weddings or important celebrations.
Tong Mo
Origami Crane, 2025
Oil on canvas
80h x 80w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
The evidence of his childhood therefore comes less from preserved images than from fragments of blurred memories: the shadow of a tree, the afternoon sunlight, a faded school desk, glass marbles, a folded paper crane. Childhood memories often emerge without warning, carrying him back to a long-forgotten afternoon.
Marcel Proust described this experience as “involuntary memory” (mémoire involontaire). The memories that matter most are often not those we consciously attempt to recall, but those suddenly awakened by an accidental encounter with an object, a scent, or a tactile sensation. Our past quietly rests within everyday things, waiting to be summoned by the passage of time.
Tong Mo
Never Sent, 2026
Oil on canvas
80h x 60w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Perhaps this is why Tong Mo’s paintings consistently possess a sense of haziness, out-of-focus imagery, and an almost overexposed temporal quality. Compared with the clarity of the external world, these blurred edges may come closer to the true nature of memory itself—for memory never preserves everything completely. Instead, it slowly freezes and dissolves between forgetting, imagination, and reality.
When we gaze upon these indistinct traces on the canvas, what we collectively recall is not merely a particular moment from the past, but the version of ourselves who once waited impatiently to grow up.
III. Before the World Took Shape
“Before the adult world truly arrived, children once created another order of their own through pieces of paper, marbles, and imagination.”
The traditional paper game “Heaven, Earth, Wind, Fire” (Dong Nan Xi Bei, literally “East, South, West, North”) may appear to be nothing more than a simple childhood pastime, yet it contains an entire imagination of fate, choice, and prophecy. Children wrote names, numbers, wishes, and punishments inside the folded paper structure, then determined one another’s imagined futures through the movement of their fingers. It possessed no real prophetic power, yet in that moment, children experienced something profound for the first time: that destiny could be shaped by rules, and that the future could be opened through the hands of another.
Tong Mo
Cootie Catcher, 2025
Oil on canvas
90h x 120w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Through marble games, children created temporary systems of order. They established boundaries, negotiated rules, and learned how to accept loss. For many, it was perhaps the first moment when they encountered the ideas of possession and absence—of having something, and of losing it. Meanwhile, handwritten notes passed beneath desks and wristwatches drawn onto skin became small acts of deviation from the “official order” of childhood.
Tong Mo
Draw a Watch on the Wrist, 2026
Oil on canvas
60h x 60w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
As children, we could never truly possess adult time, yet we could draw a watch upon our wrists. Unable to decide when a classroom would end, we created another secret life beneath the surface of the desk. Games therefore became a way for children to claim freedom beyond established structures, as well as a form of “rehearsal” for the adult world to come.
Viewed from this perspective, these vanished childhood games reveal the gradual emergence and formation of individual consciousness through play and interaction. We learned to compete, to exchange secrets, and to encounter the unfairness of chance for the first time. In those moments, we discovered: rules are not naturally given—they can be created, and they can also be bypassed.
Tong Mo
Game of Marbles, 2026
Oil on canvas
120h x 90w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
The moments frozen within Tong Mo’s paintings rarely exist entirely outside social structures. Instead, children are always moving along the edges of rules: school discipline, family expectations, hierarchies among peers, and the desires newly introduced by consumer culture all collectively shaped the environment in which they grew. Yet play temporarily softened these structures. Through games, children could rename objects, redistribute values, and transform an ordinary piece of paper into an instrument of fate.
IV. The Futures That Never Arrived
Mark Fisher proposed a profoundly influential concept in Capitalist Realism: “Lost Futures.” He argued that the fundamental crisis brought about by late capitalism is not simply the loss of the past, but the loss of our ability to imagine the future. At a certain point in life, we suddenly become aware that time seems to stretch only so far—that the horizon of possibility has become visible. When the future begins to resemble the present itself, we instinctively turn our gaze backward. Nostalgia thus becomes not merely a longing for what has been lost, but a response to the disappearance of our capacity to imagine what might come.
Tong Mo
千纸鹤 2 Origami Crane 2, 2025
Oil on canvas
130h x 150w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
For those of us who grew up in the 1990s and around the turn of the millennium, childhood was accompanied by a relatively clear image of the future: through education, one would gain greater possibilities; through work, one would establish a stable life; and through that stability, one would gradually build a family and a way of living that seemed more independent and abundant than that of previous generations.
Yet when these imagined futures eventually arrived, they revealed a complexity far beyond what childhood could have anticipated. We gradually discovered that effort does not always lead directly toward the lives we once envisioned, nor do material achievements necessarily provide lasting security. Intimate relationships, too, have been redefined through the tensions between economic responsibility, personal choice, and self-realization. Those symbols that once represented happiness have acquired far more complex and layered meanings within the adult world of a new generation.
Tong Mo
Pull-Grass Game, 2025
Oil on canvas
100h x 140w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Our experience of time, too, has transformed from the imaginary watch Tong Mo once drew upon the wrist into calendars, tasks, and deadlines. And when we finally gained the freedom to play without restraint, those moments once reserved for rest and leisure became increasingly occupied by advertising and virtual entertainment. In the age of AI, attention has become a new form of resource, while algorithmic consumerism continues to reshape our relationship with time—constructing a present that is, in some ways, even more virtualized than our memories of childhood.
At the end of In the Heat of the Sun, the adult Ma Xiaojun encounters his former companions on the streets of contemporary Beijing. They have already entered the adult world, sitting inside a car and searching for traces of the past. When they call out the secret phrase from their adolescence, they discover that the voice that once answered them has already fallen silent.
Tong Mo’s works offer a subtle response to this meditation on time: the child is the embodiment of futurity itself. Those childhood expectations that have yet to be fulfilled may not be failed promises, but rather a source of resistance against the sense of “nothingness” that accompanies adulthood. The young Ma Xiaojun remains forever suspended upon that blue summer water. Perhaps the past appears so radiant, so bathed in sunlight that it seems almost without shadow, not because that era was free of darkness, but because at that time we still believed that beyond the horizon of light, another world was waiting.