Studio Visit: Dominique Fung

By Danni Shen

Dominique Fung recently moved into a new art studio. Since relocating to New York City from Toronto four years ago, Fung had worked out of her Bed-Stuy loft where I previously visited her. It was there that I saw an early painting of hers entitled A Chinese Dignitary Pregnant after eating cake (2017). It’s one of two pieces Fung has kept for herself and her first work to blend traditional Chinese ceramics and figures, an epiphany that has now become her conceptual deep-dive into the fetishization and exoticization of Asian womanhood.

Dominique Fung studio. Photo by Dominique Fung.

Such Ornamentalist and Orientalist tropes were perpetuated by Western canonical painting, and it is an aesthetics that Fung subverts in her unique utilization of styles ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch painting to Romantic, Neo-Classical, and Surrealist motifs. Coupled with a love for film and concept art, this approach informs Fung’s mise-en-scène. In her new studio, one work-in-progress depicts a life-size, Qianlong-period, floral double-gourd vase transforming into a lounging figure. An entanglement of limbs holds out a knife and slashes a sliver from its own midsection. While uncanny and violent, the view appears almost sensual in its revelation of flesh within a porcelain vessel...READ MORE