Eternal Summer

CAROLINE WONG

ETERNAL SUMMER

Alessandro Albanese Gallery is delighted to present Eternal Summer, a solo exhibition of new and older pastel drawings on canvas and on paper by Caroline Wong (b. 1986, Malaysia), her first with the gallery after her residency in Matera, Italy.

“Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve”. 

John Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life (published by Allen Lane)

“In the Western world, food has very clearly adopted a sinful quality for women. We can choose to reject it but there is guilt around indulgence and eating. That’s why, for me when women talk about food in their work, it directly becomes rebellious.”

Natalia González Martin, painter.

Caroline Wong is a young British-Malaysian artist who uses her own imaginary childhood memories of cats and women as a recurring central motif in her practice. Baring herself to her audience, drawing is, for her, a form of bodily, creative catharsis. She states, “my work is about women who freely express who they are and who they want to be while feasting and enjoying what is happening around them, inspired by the freedom and amorality of their feline companions.”

For her debut Art-O-Rama solo booth, Eternal Summer, Wong has made a series of pastel drawings from her ongoing Cats and Girls series. Most were made during her residency this July in Matera and others were made in her London studio. Pastel is a rare and undervalued medium in today’s spectrum of contemporary art, often still mired in a gendered discourse that pits the ‘feminine’ delicacy of pastel against the more substantial, ‘masculinity’ of oil painting. In the 18th and 19th century, pastel drawing was indeed likened to applying makeup and regarded as an inferior medium suitable for women and amateur artists. Wong however injects in her use of pastel, an energy that is by turns sensual and chaotic, delicate and visceral. The languages of drawing and painting, femininity and masculinity become enmeshed.

Still life (abundance, mortality), round, ripe fruit (resurrection, everlasting life), cats (life, death, independence, femininity, ambiguity, mystery), pasta and other Asian and non-Asian foods (consumption, decadence) provide the backdrop for a curiously opaque portrait of the artist. She decidedly shows little of her physical self. The sitters are friends and models that she chooses and photographs after having briefed them on the subject of the work. She often asks them to revert to a more childlike and animal-like self and to imagine themselves gorging on a feast. The way they devour is shameless and feral. The viewer has the impression of peering through a peephole, spying on an intimate, strange scene. Like Degas once secretly observed and drew women bathing, we similarly witness, as he put it, women ‘stripped of their coquetry and in their animal states’. The gestures of the women are confident and fearless, enhanced by the brilliance of colour and dynamism of line. Never alone, the models are accompanied by cats who inhabit the same space and share the same food. Felines are the shadows of these female figures, echoing the bold presence of their personalities and perhaps the presence of the artist herself. 

As Heidegger observed in his phenomenologically inspired writings on the origin of art, the artwork and the artist exist within a dynamic where each appears to be a provider of the other: "Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other." Art, a concept separate from both work and creator, thus exists as the source for them both. Rather than the artist having ultimate control, art becomes the force that uses the creator for art's own purposes. Likewise, the resulting work must be considered in the context of the world in which it exists, not that of its artist.

That world, in the context of today’s reality, happens to be dominated, at least in the West, by a world of men, and male artists who still dictate the rules of the game. In Wong’s works, the status quo is subverted. We have the presence of a community of women which is in fact an absence in real life. These women fill the space of the paper with their power, emotions, and appetite inscribed in every pastel mark and hue. While on the surface repetitive, there is never a repetition in Wong’s drawings; it is more a game of appearances where the tactility of pastel gives us a tour de force of textures, colours, and sensations.

If you look closely at her works, you will notice that most of the time, no one is looking back at the viewer. In a world of social media voyeurs, her protagonists never allow their energy to be dispersed beyond the limits of their power (the canvas). The centre of their attention is confined yet focused on what they are doing and what is happening in their particular world. They are prioritising their needs and desires, and maybe they are asking us to do so too. What if occasionally we relinquish our sense of morality and allow ourselves to forget the rules we slavishly adhere to? And where is the line between desire and happiness? Abundance and excess? Multiple answers are on the table as multiple questions and layers of interpretation emerge from Wong’s ravenous drawings. 

Text by Sveva D’Antonio