A person

A place

A thing

Taymour Grahne is pleased to present Looking Backward, Moving Forward, a solo exhibition by NYC-based artist Dominique Fung, opening on November 8.

Underpinning Fung’s new body of work are inquiries into identity and existence. What is a person? What is a thing? These questions examine the subject-object relationship, where a subject is characterised as an observer and an object as a thing observed.

Through painting Orientalized tropes of period artifacts, Fung subverts the fantasies and dangers of the “Orient/Ornament”, reclaiming the space once inhabited by false narratives. The paintings evoke a gratifying world full of genteel pleasure, adopting aesthetics of indulgence, decadence and celebration. Awash with colour, there are also uncanny surrealist ideologies underpinning a subtler and subversive critique about history, culture and contemporary life. Sensual bodies are painted creamily alongside baths, fine china, rugs, rose petals, slippers, tchotchkes and food - existing side by side in a surreal, multilayered pictorial space.

The work is an investigation into Orientalist ideologies, actively dismantling, then reframing nocuous fantasies such as exoticism, eroticism, the ‘foreign’ body, the primitive, the feminine, the infantile, and cosmetic narratives.

Each painting is an individual negotiation into the fluctuating tensions between depth and surface, interiority and exteriority, utility and decoration, and femininity and masculinity. Formative objects look out from the canvas and dare the viewer. These objects are often more animated by spirit than the figures who lack eyes. However so, they confront you and challenge the observational hierarchy. Who is doing the looking and who has the agency? Are you inside the body or are you the object? Or are you just here for the spectacle?

Dominique Fung (b. 1987, Ottawa, Canada) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BAA from Sheridan College Institute of Technology in Toronto, Canada. Fung’s paintings have been exhibited at Virginia Museum of Modern Art (Virginia, USA), Project Gallery (Toronto, Canada) and Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Washington DC, USA). Dominique has a forthcoming solo show opening at Nicodim Gallery in LA in 2020.