In Cantonese, jook-sing is a pejorative term for persons of Chinese descent who live overseas and identify more strongly with western culture. The term itself evolved poetically from the word for “bamboo pole.” Bamboo rods are hollow and compartmentalized, so if one is to pour water in one end, it is trapped, unable to flow through to the other side.
Dominique Fung was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, to first-generation parents from Shanghai and Hong Kong. At home, she spoke Cantonese, at school English. Her early artistic passions were informed by Vermeer, Manet, Rembrandt, and Goya, but her sense of Chinese heritage was largely informed by vessels and objects she saw at home and on display in the Asian art section during visits to the Met in New York.
The relics in the museum, Fung thought, were jook-sing like her: anonymously Asian in appearance, separated and oftentimes stolen from their original contexts by oceans, hemispheres, and centuries, imbued with identity by masters long since deceased. She imagined what the objects’ lives were like when they were born, what they held within their bodies, who touched and used them, how they felt about it. She began to think of them as concubines, with personalities, secrets, and stories to share. She wondered what they’d look like with hair. She realized her relationship to her own Cantonese identity was shaded by a sort of 19th century Orientalism.
In her 2018 essay “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Anne Anlin Cheng defines 19th century Orientalism as such: “that opulence and sensuality are the signature components of Asiatic character; that Asia is always ancient, excessive, feminine, available, and decadent; that material consumption promises cultural possession; that there is no room ... for national, ethnic, or historical specificities.” The Asian art section at the Met is Orientalist, thought Fung. In a way, so was she.
Relics and Remains, Fung’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, is the result of the subsequent years of research into her motherland’s cultural history, casting the objects in the Met she once fetishized as an entry point. These paintings are the artist’s dark and playful exploration of her own jook-sing-ness; they navigate and reclaim the water of her identity suspended within bamboo.
— Ben Lee Ritchie Handler
Dominique Fung (b. 1987, Ottawa, Canada) lives and works in New York. She received her BAA from Sheridan College Institute of Technology in Toronto in 2009. Recent exhibitions include Hollywood Babylon: A Re-Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Nicodim, Jeffrey Deitch, and AUTRE Magazine, Los Angeles, USA (2020); If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, MAMOTH, London, UK (2020); Skin Stealers, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Trans World, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest, Romania (2019); Wash Your Corners, Ross + Kramer, New York, USA (2019, solo); Dominique Fung, Taymour Grahne, London, United Kingdom (2019, solo); Barmecide Feast, The 14th Factory, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, USA (2018).
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: Relics and Remains at Nicodim Gallery is an impressive series of oil paintings in which the artist addresses not only her personal Chinese heritage as a first-generation Canadian, but the way in which tradition, immigration, feminism, and art history play into that self-exploration.
Born and raised in Ottawa to first-generation parents from Shanghai and Hong Kong, Fung’s current solo exhibition is a dark and playful exploration of “jook-sing-ness.” In Cantonese, jook-sing is a pejorative term for persons of Chinese descent who live overseas and identify more strongly with western culture.
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.
Dominique Fung's newest solo show, Relics & Remains, with Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles, is a dense and beautiful showcase that fully realizes Fung's vision as a painter.
In Los Angeles, several galleries have independently organized and created their own marketing website, galleryplatform.la. They have also formed a group, Gallery Association Los Angeles (GALA for short), with plans to continue long-term as the only citywide art dealers’ association.
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.
