Dominique Fung

For a new generation of figurative painters, reality is best processed through a fantastical lens.

With sold-out exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Shanghai; museum curators buying up her works, which climb into six-figure pricing territory; and enthusiastic coverage from Vice to Juxtapoz to Bomb, Dominique Fung, who turns 34 this year, has established a career that would be the envy of artists decades her senior. 

“Dominique Fung’s compositions are at once haunting and enchanting, not to mention delicious!” says Agnes Lew. “I immediately fell in love with her depictions of food, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface as well. Referencing art history movements globally, her paintings offer subtle, wry commentary on the way the West sees the East, and how she sees herself within this dichotomy.” Fung's works are influenced by Dunhuang frescoes on the Silk Road and other displaced objects from Asia in The Metropolitan Museum’s collection. She opens a two-person exhibition with Katherina Olschbaur this fall at Galeria Nicodim in Bucharest, and her second solo exhibition with Nicodim Los Angeles in February 2022.

Through Fung’s exhibitions, the artist has shared a multitude of narratives surrounding her objects. In her current presentation at Jeffrey Deitch, they’re captured, contained, and displayed devoid of context—paralleling the canonical showcase of Chinese cultural and historical objects of unknown provenance in both art institutions and homes.

Fung’s bathing women are depicted as lifeless objects—more material than even the foo dogs beside the pool, more material than the rugs and the vases. They are depicted under a dehumanizing gaze. Fung’s new exhibition is another attempt—perhaps a more direct attempt—at flipping the orientalist script. Maybe this time, we’ll listen.

In her new studio, one work-in-progress which Fung is finishing for ART021 in Shanghai, 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. 

In her exhibition at Nicodim Gallery, Fung explored the limits of museums as disseminators of knowledge. "Through the Looking Glass" (2020) takes its name from the Met's 2015 exhibition "China: Through the Looking Glass," curated by Andrew Bolton. While it achieved record-breaking attendance at the time, the exhibition was highly controversial for what critics say celebrated Western designers' appropriation of Chinese culture -- to produce chinoiserie fashions.

In Relics and Remains, Fung’s portraits reframe East Asiatic femininity, prompting the viewer to interrogate the tropes of Orientalism. Her work provides respite from the exhausting emptiness of the cult of authenticity.

Created in New York during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fung’s most recent works grapple with themes of Orientalism and Asiatic femininity in somber tones, enticing her audience with ominous surrealism, rather than playful fantasies.

Dominique Fung’s exhibition at Nicodim was a particular joy after long weeks of viewing art digitally. Her paintings are an uncanny blend of figuration, abstraction, and surrealist objects that merge together in harmonious locomotion across the canvas. 

With newfound time on our hands, there's no better moment to discover a new artist. Second generation Chinese-Canadian artist Dominique Fung takes the often problematic depictions of the East in Western art—think Henri Rousseau and Jéan Léon Gérôme and their exoticized paintings of far away lands—and reconfigures them through her own lens. Drawing on Orientalist ideologies and artefacts, she dismantles and reframes them within warm, luscious and surreal landscapes. 

Second generation Chinese-Canadian painter Dominique Fung collects these problematic notions and recasts them through her own lens, refiguring art history to give her subjects real agency. Her work is luscious, refined and inviting. Warmly lit, melodically composed and exuding sensual energy, Fung’s paintings don’t appear critical at first glance, but upon closer inspection, her subjects protest, laugh and make absurd gestures, posturing themselves politically in Fung’s world.

Dominique Fung‘s paintings are a splendor for the senses. Drawing influence from her Chinese background, Fung turns centuries old tropes on their head to make statements about modern day life as a woman. Full of rich color and a visual exuberance, Fung’s works evoke a classical essence while making their own original mark.

Dominique Fung’s series of vase paintings exemplifies this seamless alchemy of ornamentalism: her vessels wear Chinese dresses and bows, their curved forms transforming them into hybrids—Asiatic women-objects. “It’s my way of reclaiming space that feels like it’s been taken away from me,” Fung says.