Dominique Fung’s surreal blend of opulence and objectification

For Plaster’s guest editorship of Catalogue Magazine Issue 7.0, Harriet-Lloyd Smith discovers that in the painted world of Dominique Fung, not all is as it seems

Dominique Fung photographed in her Brooklyn studio by David Spence

The Nepenthes is a majestic plant. Its leaf formations look like smooth, bulbous ceramic vessels with a sensual, feminine shape. Its colours are variegated and painterly – pastel pinks and oranges. Insects flock for a taste, weak to its charms. But this is Nepenthes’ trick: using beauty to deceive, to lure its prey before swallowing them whole in one clean snap.

I was reminded of this plant when I first saw Dominque Fung’s paintings. Their glossy, smooth surfaces are warm and inviting, sometimes cute and comedic. But just beneath their veneer is something more critical, more uneasy – much harder to swallow.

I speak to Fung via video call. She’s at home in Brooklyn, New York, fresh from The Armory Show, where she exhibited a 100-piece sculpture called Marketplace – a mobile wooden market stand carrying antique objects from China and the artist’s own ceramic sculptures – as part of the fair’s Platform section, curated by Eugenie Tsai. The Armory lasted four days; Fung spent four months making the work. “If it wasn’t for Eugenie, I wouldn’t have done the exhibition. You put so much love, time and effort into something, and it’s up and then down.”

Dominique Fung photographed in her Brooklyn studio by David Spence
Fung didn’t study fine art; her visual education was gathered during museum visits
Dominique Fung's Brooklyn studio photographed by David Spence
Fung is second-generation Chinese-Canadian with ancestry in Shanghai and Hong Kong

It’s been months since Fung last painted, but she’s itching to get back to it. “I feel a little insecure, you know, I’m like, ‘do I remember how to paint?’ I’m sure it’ll be fine once I start. But I feel strange right now.”

Fung didn’t study fine art; her visual education was gathered during museum visits. “Like the Met, for example, you walk in and you’re presented specifically with European paintings, and then everything else is in the periphery,” she reflects. “So I just spent thousands of hours, you know, looking at these paintings. I was like, ‘but this is what a good painting is, right?’”

The 19th-century European artists Fung was drawn to – Rousseau, Ingres, Delacroix – depicted the opulence of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Beautiful and finely executed, yes, but also problematic. These paintings – created during an increase of colonial activity – were often pure fantasy, served as fact to a western audience enraptured by the exoticism of these foreign lands. Although much was rooted in a genuine fascination with civilisations unseen, the works generated tropes – particularly women via the male gaze, from harems to geishas – that served to reinforce imperial power, while belittling and fetishising eastern traditions.

She began to veer from museum painting wings to uncover a more global cross-section of objects. “I wanted to look at stuff that’s important to my culture,” says Fung, who is second-generation Chinese-Canadian with ancestry in Shanghai and Hong Kong. “It’s things that are in my home, with my family, or what I would see on vacation in Asia. I spent a lot of time looking at these objects, but I didn’t think to incorporate them into my practice at the time. I felt like maybe I was othering my own culture.” Fung hasn’t been back to China, but this spring, she’ll have a show with Massimo de Carlo, Hong Kong, which she’s now in the early stages of researching. “My whole family’s very excited.”

Dominique Fung oil painting of hands holding fans and flowers
Dominique Fung, Translucent Hand Fan, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and MASSIMODECARLO. Photo: Shark Sanesac

My viewpoint is feminist, as an Asian woman operating in this world.

Dominique Fung

Instead of contradicting the visual language of the European Orientalists, Fung plays them at their own game. She mines them for formal techniques and samples their visual language of sublimity and illusion, before turning the whole thing on its head in vast, fantastical dreamscapes filled with eerie transformations and fleshy, feminine contortions; the closer you look, the more sinister it all becomes. “I think I’m using the idea of opulence, this glossiness in order to draw the viewer in,” she says. “But also questioning why they are painting a female figure in this way, and all the inaccuracies.”

Fung studied illustration at university and learned a lot about animation from her fellow students; it felt like a more viable career option than painting. “I’m from Ottawa, it’s not very big. We have one museum and maybe a handful of very small galleries,” she says. Her first art exhibition was in a hotel in Toronto, where she paid a small fee in exchange for hanging her work. “I was like, I’m gonna just test this out to see if I even like doing this,” she recalls. “I think I fell in love at that moment. I was like, ‘this is what I want to do, I’m gonna find a way to make this a reality’. I flew down to New York, and that’s how it started. I realised, ‘oh, you can actually do this as a career.’”

Aspects of her animation training feed into her painting. “There are rules about what is a good picture, good lighting and good colour,” she says. “I think a lot of animation mimics work by John Singer Sargent, Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt van Rijn, which have this specific type of light.”

Before we spoke, I scrolled through Fung’s Instagram page. Until around 2020, her use of colour was vibrant, pastelled, and shiny. Since then, it’s been a gradual shift into umbers and ochres, as if her paintings have been passed through the guts of history. “When I was painting in the brighter colours, I think I was looking at more contemporary art and objects from the Ming Dynasty,” she says. “In the past maybe four or five years, I started looking at much older works and objects from the Tang and Shang Dynasty, where the colours have faded. Generally, they’re a little bit more muted. What’s left are these bronze objects that have been dug up because everything else has disintegrated. They have these green-ish umber tones.”

Dominique Fung rearranging furniture in her Brooklyn studio photographed by David Spence
Fung grew up in Ottawa and studied 2D animation at university

Fung sees her paintings as a sequence, and works strictly on a one-at-a-time basis. Because of this, she didn’t even notice the colour shift. “It was so incremental, this very slow transition. And now, looking back, I’m like, ‘whoa!’”

Fung’s process involves trawling auction catalogues, online archives and books to find objects. This becomes an archive, a treasure trove of visual references on which to base works. But there are other key reference points, too: Surrealists like Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington and Eleonor Fini, even contemporary stand-up comedy for its ability to layer ideas and create the illusion of dialogue, and more specifically, Anne Anlin Cheng’s book, Ornamentalism. “She’s literally putting what I’m doing into words,’” Fung recalls. “I just knew that I felt this sense of objectification through objects. The fan is a big symbol of this, because it’s usually used as a trope in film or even in fashion, for the demure Asian woman about to come onto the scene, or like the wrathful, vengeful, evil Chinese woman.”

This is what Fung does best: probes her own personal history while reclaiming a legacy of histories in the process. “I want the paintings to have this layered feeling,” she adds.

Close-up portrait of Dominique Fung by the window in her Brooklyn studio photographed by David Spence
This spring, she’ll have a show with Massimo de Carlo, Hong Kong
Dominique Fung photographed on her sofa by David Spence
Fung sees her paintings as a sequence, and works strictly on a one-at-a-time basis

One recent work in particular speaks to this: Cake, 2024, shown in a group show earlier this year at James Fuentes gallery. On the face of it, Cake seems celebratory. But sandwiched between the layers are more sinister tones. Severed arms grab onto lit candles, which transform into paddles. It’s surreal and ambiguous but touches on the homogeneity of labour. “I was thinking about these objects being created and how many hands are needed to make things or the economy of creating objects. My viewpoint is feminist, as an Asian woman operating in this world.”

Fung’s sculpture exist in the same realm as paintings, notably in their approach to light, but it’s not as if her painted objects have climbed off their canvases and embodied 3D form. “When I’m making those sculptures, I’m not necessarily pulling from the painting,” says Fung. “They’re separate, but also the same. I don’t know if that makes any sense!”

The word ‘ornament’ is particularly important in Fung’s work. It feels hollow, but it’s heavy with notions of superficiality, ownership and identity, assumed or imposed. The subjects, objects and East Asian artefacts in her paintings and sculptures are once more protagonists, liberated from their fate as cultural tropes. “I’m not sure who coined the term ornamentalism, but that hit me really hard – the ornamentalisation of the clothes and the exterior things that are put onto our personhood.”

Archetypal beauty is rarely as it seems. Within, it can contain objectification, sexualisation, reinforced tropes, and in the case of Orientalist painting, all of the above, plus cold hard inaccuracy. Fung’s paintings might look like still life, but their objects have lives of their own.

Information

This article was published in Catalogue Issue No. 7.0, guest-edited by Plaster. For more information about Cork Street Galleries, and where to get hold of a physical issue, visit corkstgalleries.com

Credits
Words:Harriet Lloyd-Smith
Photography:David Spence

Suggested topics

Suggested topics