Born in Cameroon, artist Barthélémy Toguo lives and works in France. His work is centered around two main themes: nature and humanity. The former explores birth, death, viruses, flora and fauna, while the latter focuses on migration, colonialism, race and refugees. In parallel, Tugo uses painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, video and, most importantly, installation to multifacetedly address the delicate relationship between the Third World and the Western world.

As an artist, Tugo travels a lot, thus he witnesses the world he lives in and hopes to evoke the forgotten memories of people and nature in his creations. His monochrome watercolor paintings are presented in the form of a travel diary, and in his early attempts he gradually abstracted the human figure and incorporated animal characteristics into a new creature that is blurred and unrecognizable. This is continued and sublimated in the artist's latest series, Human Spring. For example, Human Spring No.7 shows the human form as both newborn and dead, a metaphor for the cycle of life in nature. In addition, Tugo fuses the human body with plants, and in Human Spring No.1, the human torso grows freely like a vine. This mirrors Human Spring No.5, in which the trunks and branches of plants are transformed into human arms and fingers that extend outward, demonstrating the vitality of the earth's spring. In "Human Spring No.3", the artist constructs the world of the human mind, spanning the human and the outside world, and connecting reality with nature. The work "Spring of Humanity No.2" borrows the classic Noah's Ark imagery, in which human beings from all corners of the world are in the same boat, expressing equality and respect, unity and harmony. Therefore, Tugo's works cross all kinds of borders, barriers and boundaries between human beings and nature, breaking through the limitations of individual experiences and territoriality with flowing images, and spreading into dialogues and resonances in a universal sense.