Based in New York, Dominique Fung is a second-generation Chinese-Canadian with ancestry in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Landing at the intersection of tradition, culture and memory, her paintings conjure a sense of belonging. Fung’s visual language challenges how history has excluded and exoticised Asian identity and femininity. Confronting the issues of representation in Western and Oriental art traditions, Fung paints figures, bodies, and objects whose presence has historically been subject to the controlling gaze and lens perpetuated by the systems of imperialism and colonialism.
Fung – who studied illustration with a focus on animation in university – had her formative introduction to painting take place in museums, having spent hours with 19th-century European artists like Henri Rousseau, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. In their canvases, painted at the height of colonial power, the representation of the East, albeit beautiful, is skewed by the conspicuous exoticism of the foreignness. The culture and identity become reduced to the otherness of a fantasy, too often intrinsically transferred onto the bodies of women and people of colour.
To Walk Towards/Away
Courtesy, Lyra Collection
Fung works directly with these histories of misrepresentation, recasting them into a visual language that brings back her subjects’ agency. Employing the formal techniques of Western traditions and leaning into the allure of mysticism and illusion, the artist exposes the inaccuracies and flawed power dynamics of the Western-centric worldview. As the opulence of the paintings draws the viewer into a space of critical questioning, Fung’s fascination with surrealists like Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington translates into layered narratives. To Walk Towards/Away (2023), which LYRA is proud to hold in its collection, depicts a multitude of bodiless legs caught mid-movement on a fantastical shore, on which lies a silhouette of Venus. The piece is a prime example of the artist’s unique combination of surrealist and art-historical motifs, as the reference to Botticelli's Primavera seeps through the canvas.
To Leave a Place/Memory
Courtesy of the artist, and MASSIMODECARLO
In Fung’s paintings, the historical artefacts and visual codes gain a living presence, while layers of narratives are repeated across canvases, gaining the power of visibility. So often treated as cultural tropes and uninformed stereotypes, the artefacts, vessels, and sculptures are protagonists in the paintings as much as the human subjects are, thereby gaining agency in the quest for liberation. This approach rejects the binary logic that has led to a hierarchical view of the world, propagated by the Western (art) historical tradition – which here is being unwritten and undermined. The ambiguity inherent in her canvases is equally a form of resistance to oversimplification, a process often employed by imperial power to undermine the power of others. Fung untangles the colonial paradigm through the use of the very visual language that once upheld it, and in so doing, strips it of relevance and reveals the flaws in its foundations.
A Chinese Dignitary Pregnant after eating cake
Courtesy of the artist
Fung subverts the once embedded narratives by employing humour and working with composition and perspective. Her paintings have sensual, soft, even comforting hues, as beneath the glossy finish lies a far less comforting criticality. The objects in her work are sourced by Fung through extensive research in auction catalogues, museum displays, books and online material. The resulting archive of artefacts entwines history with the artist’s lived experience of being drawn to objects in her family home, those she would see during visits to Asia, those that reflect and inform her identity.
The visual and cultural references are directly translated into Fung’s painterly choices. For example, up until 2020, the artist’s colour palette leaned towards vibrant and glossy, an outcome of the artist’s study of artefacts from the Ming Dynasty, along with influences from contemporary art. In recent years, her focus shifted to older objects, such as those from the Tang and Shang Dynasties. The muteness of colour resulting from their age, and bronze objects, which have survived the test of time, translate into softer hues of umber and ochre in Fung’s canvases.
Will you keep singing?
Courtesy of the artist
The visual language of subversion so painstakingly articulated by Fung reverberates in LYRA’s ethos of celebrating those who question and challenge the norm. Throughout history, the female body has often been employed to uphold societal hegemonies, a practice that Fung and other LYRA artists, such as Barbara Kruger and Sylvia Sleigh, actively resist. In her work and through a stark feminist stance, Fung addresses the longstanding prejudice that entraps the bodies of Asian women – a femininity that is at once fetishised and denied sexuality. Across decades under the Western gaze, the Asian woman is not seen as a subject, but rather as an object: valued, but stereotyped.
Another major reference in the artist’s practice is Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism, which puts into words what Fung expresses through painting. Cheng writes about Asiatic femininity as portrayed in Western visual culture, describing a particular condition of personhood and objecthood being fused. While Orientalism turns persons into things so they can be possessed, Ornamentalism taps into a fantasy of turning things into persons, with the resulting sexualisation and objectification subsequently projected back onto real identities. Fung confronts this back-and-forth head-on, blurring the boundaries between subject and object to challenge the fantasies imposed by colonial desire. In her paintings, bodies have autonomy, objects are liberated from tropes, and still life is invigorated with presence and agency.