Dominique Fung & Avant Arte
New collaboration coming soon
Turning objects into people, and people into objects
Dominique Fung takes a fresh look at surrealist painting. She paints objects from museums and their catalogues. She also paints from auction catalogues, and historical artefacts. They come together in busy scenes with weird propositions. Swimming pools can be the same size as a teapot. Vases the same size as a door. The paintings have a soft fuzz, and their colours are warm too. Many have a honey-coloured glaze, like traditional Chinese scroll paintings. But alongside these sweet tones are ominous undercurrents. Dismembered body parts, knives, snakes and rose thorns all linger – a quietly dist...
Dominique Fung takes a fresh look at surrealist painting. She paints objects from museums and their catalogues. She also paints from auction catalogues, and historical artefacts. They come together in busy scenes with weird propositions. Swimming pools can be the same size as a teapot. Vases the same size as a door. The paintings have a soft fuzz, and their colours are warm too. Many have a honey-coloured glaze, like traditional Chinese scroll paintings. But alongside these sweet tones are ominous undercurrents. Dismembered body parts, knives, snakes and rose thorns all linger – a quietly disturbing world unfolds.
Fung flips Orientalist tropes on their head. Throughout history, Asian women in Western art have been treated as objects. Fung does the same, but with a wink and nudge. Vases and pots have human qualities like vaginas, hair, breasts and sweat. On the other hand, the people are inanimate. Faces are obscured and skin is reminiscent of shiny pottery – hairless, slim, pristine. This speaks to history and personal experience too. “The Asian-American experience is that people don’t see us as whole – as a full person with complex stories.” Likewise, the figures are reduced to parts and objects. But, through painting, Fung gives them a new story.
Bio
Dominique Fung (she/her) was born in 1987 in Ottawa, Canada. She is based in Brooklyn, New York City.
Did you know?
Dominique Fung’s parents worked in a factory producing terra-cotta after leaving Hong-Kong. Now, Fung often paints these ceramics in her work and has reflected saying, “Maybe my relationship with ceramics is coming full circle”.
At Auction
Greenly (2019) sold in May 2022 at Philips for $63,000 – up to 530% over its estimate.