‘ARTIFICIAL PARADISES’
BY CAROLINE WONG
6th -31st of October 2022
Caroline Wong’s women are languorous, voluptuous, intoxicated, and excessive. They are saturated in femininity. Wearing feathers, sequins and warm colours, they revel in the costumes of campness and are caught in acts of consumption which centralize the pleasures of smoking, drinking, and eating. Far from historical expectations of restraint and smallness, these women, like titan temptresses, fill up her canvases.
Artifice has long been seen, often negatively, as a feminized art. The ‘painted face’ is often treated with suspicion whilst the adornments of jewellery and clothing have been associated with deception, performance and prostitution. Nature on the other hand, has traditionally been considered absolute and honest. Artifice has been cast as nature’s antagonist and the title of this exhibition, ‘Artificial Paradises’ presents an intriguing paradox.
Culturally received versions of ‘Paradise’ conjure images of a prelapsarian nature, yet those depicted in Wong’s work are entirely artificial and instead capture a Baudelairian drug-infused state of pleasure; something deliciously fleeting, dizzying and delightful. Wong is seduced by all things shiny and plastic and her paintings are a celebration of the manmade and synthetic. She is influenced by cities such as Hong Kong and Bangkok which she considers to be artificial paradises in their own right and recalls the sensory excess of shopfronts, market stalls, billboards and bright neon signs along with the clashing swell of sounds and smells.
Such experiences have inspired her protagonists’ environments. Basking in electric neon lighting, Wong’s women are unslakable, enveloped in junk and ephemera such as crisp packets, makeup compacts, glittering purses, kitchen wear, bottles, books and tarot cards. They don embellished and often heavily fetishized fabrics: feathered robes, sequined dresses, slippery satin shirts. Instead of rejecting the associations of artifice, they revel in them. Like her women, Wong’s canvases are at once beautiful and base, romantic and trashy, championing the cosmetic and chaotic.
French Modernist writer Colette described solitude as ‘a heady wine [or] a bitter tonic’ and in this series, Wong’s characters are decidedly alone, revelling in states of intoxicated pleasure or gloomy self-absorption. This both continues another of Wong’s influences, Chinese Meirenhua which are idealized images of refined courtesans and concubines in their tastefully decorated boudoirs, waiting dutifully for their lovers’ return. The obedience and patience of these traditional figures is mirrored by the meticulously delicate rendering of the images, demanding the utmost restraint of the artist. In contrast, Wong’s beautiful women are directors, drunk, dreamy, and disgraced.
The loss of composure is expressed through a maximalist palette of fluorescent reds, oranges and yellows evoking states of passion, joy, fever, hedonism and hallucination. The sizzling palette is, for Wong, another form of feminine resistance. Wong works against the Platonic disdain of colour and the association of line and structure with masculinity and colour and adornment with feminine excess of emotion. By lavishing torrid colours on her canvases Wong centralizes the emotive, the reactionary, and the seductive. Furthermore, the Meirenhua’s neat, contained linearity is abandoned in favour of rapturously applied layers of paint and pastel. She indulgently loses herself in the colours and textures of her mediums, resulting in expressive daubs which susurrate on the canvas. Her application of materials straddles the threshold between reality and fantasy, self-restraint and loss of control.
Wong prioritizes the interiority and agency of her characters. Their psychologies seep into their surroundings, transmogrifying the random clutter of the home into personalized chaos. Her fondness for the domestic recalls the intimism of painters Vuillard and Bonnard, both of whom combined impressionist painterliness with the florid decorative surfaces of the home to evoke ‘the magic and melancholy of the mundane.’ The home has often been regarded within feminist discourse as an oppressive, confining space, and there is a general push for contemporary female artists to extricate themselves from it. But for Wong, the home provides warmth and respite from the outside world and is the place where, liberated from societal rules and expectations, one is free to muse, ponder and daydream. Her thoughts are in line with French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who declared the home a place that ‘shelters daydreaming, protects the dreamer, allows one to dream in peace.’ It is this oneiric world that Wong wishes to escape into whether through creating or looking at the works.
This exhibition celebrates excess. It honours female pleasure and refuses containment or restraint. The confluence of femininity and excess in Wong’s paintings is a raucous rejection of expectations of femininity. Her protagonists are resolute and guiltless in their relish of momentary pleasure and voluptuous abundance.
Caroline Wong’s work responds to traditional and restricted representations of East Asian women. For Wong, subverting these ideals is the essence of her practice. Her beginnings as an artist, lay in more traditional forms of portraiture yet as she has grown, she has nurtured the epicurean side of herself, moving towards more excitable, expressive mark-making driven by a hedonistic desire for fun. She likens creating to eating. In both, she becomes consumed by the moment of pleasure, detaching herself from the world. The final image presents a hot, sticky portal of pleasure and the senses. The scintillating heat of her portraits is a visual representation of this joy and decadence, whilst also being reminiscent of the chaos and colour of Southeast Asia. Whether depicting female friendships or obdurately exhibiting female pleasure in food, her work is a joyful push-back against tradition, celebrating the beauty in excess.
Selected shows include: Drawn Out, Drawing Room, London (2021): Euphoric, Procrastinarting (online) (2021): Out of the Frying Pan and into the Woods, New Normal Projects x One Four Seven, London (2021), The Dinner Table, Sanmei Gallery, London (2021), Saturnalia, Purslane x Art City Works (online) (2022), In the Land of Cockaigne, Quench Gallery, Margate (2022): Lotus Eaters: Shailee Mehta and Caroline Wong, Indigo + Madder, London (2022): Eat Drink Man Woman, 180 Strand, London (2022): À La Carte, Tchotchke Gallery, New York, (2022)
