Tsholo Motong

Tsholo "Splash" Motong builds faces out of fabric. Working from Soweto, he collects traditional textiles from across the continent and cuts them into hundreds of small, oddly shaped pieces. Each portrait is assembled like a mosaic on canvas, layered with acrylic and paper collage. Shweshwe from Lesotho and South Africa, Kente from Ghana, Swazi prints from Eswatini, Kalanga cloth from Zimbabwe, Malian bògòlanfini: patterns that were never meant to sit together, coaxed into a single human face. "I use different fabrics from different cultures, countries and tribes," he says, "to tell a single story that resonates with all the cultures."

That idea has a name in South Africa — Ubuntu, often translated as "I am because we are." It's the belief that a person becomes fully human only through other people, and it's the organizing principle of Motong's work: each face is singular and unmistakable, yet made entirely of hundreds of equally distinct parts. He builds it by hand, one fabric fragment at a time.

His subjects are the people of Soweto and Johannesburg — market vendors with babies on their backs, jazz musicians, the women who anchor township life. He was "born and raised in Soweto, which has a rich history of migrant labour," and the work stays close to it.

The women come first for a reason. Motong was raised largely by women, in a house where cloth was work: a grandmother who knitted blankets and jerseys and crocheted, and a mother who was a seamstress, sewing curtains and bedding with hand embroidery. "She was my pillar. She raised me up from the ground up," he says of his grandmother. "She used to do crafts like knitting and crochet, so that's how I started learning how to work with fabrics and colors and enjoy textures. She didn't scold me when I told her I wanted to venture into this career."

He took a degree in fashion design and worked for several established Johannesburg designers. When cheap imports saturated the industry, he moved into art, which asked for the same skills. That tailor's eye is everywhere in the work — in the cut of each piece, in the confidence with color he calls "a spice of life." There's a quiet ethic underneath the exuberance, too. Motong works almost entirely in reclaimed fabric, giving material a second life rather than letting it go to waste — "making an old product into something new, something different."

His work was the lead photograph of National Geographic's March 2024 feature on Johannesburg's artists. A 2023 fabric collage, Are We Really Free, appears on the cover of a Peter Lang study of African women's writing. In 2025 the University of Pretoria's student paper named him alongside Sam Nhlengethwa and Willie Bester among notable figures in South African collage.

Up close, a Motong portrait is hundreds of separate pieces of printed cloth, each with its own country and its own history. Step back, and someone is looking back at you.

• 2026 — Cover artwork, Isabella Villanova, The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women's Fiction, Peter Lang, Oxford / New York
• 2025 — Named among notable South African collage artists, PDBY, University of Pretoria
• 2024 — Featured, National Geographic Traveller (UK), March 2024
• 2023 — Castro Art Walk feature, Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco
• 2019 — Television feature, Making a Splash: The work of South African artist Tsholo 'Splash' Motong, CGTN, Johannesburg

• 2025 — Ya Balozi, Art House SF, San Francisco, USA
• 2024 — I Am Because We Are, Art House SF, San Francisco, USA
• 2023 — Faces of Soweto, Art House SF, San Francisco, USA
• 2022 — Proud and Beautiful, Art House SF, San Francisco, USA

Motong's work has been placed with private collectors through Art House SF in thirteen U.S. states — California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, Georgia, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, New Jersey and Oregon — and in Germany, Switzerland and Italy.