The SISTERhood Edit: Interview with Caroline Wong
In this new series, we shine the spotlight on badass, superwomen who are doing amazing things for their community and the world at large. These women are changing the narrative of how women are perceived in the world, and are representing us with grace, dignity and style.
This month we chat to Caroline Wong, a British-Malaysian female artist, whose goal is to rework the classical and contemporary images of East Asian women for example the delicate Gongbi paintings of ‘virtuous women’ to the kitsch 1930s calendar posters of the ‘modern woman’. Caroline is adding her own voice, her own gaze, her own perspective to an age-old tradition in East Asian art that has often presented female beauty as a type and defined beauty in terms of weakness, quietness, and humility. As celebrations of non-conformity, personal autonomy, and creativity, her mostly life-size portraits depict women who, in their own way, have carved out their own identity and rejected prescribed ideals of femininity.
Caroline, we’d like to know a little about you, what is your background and what inspired you to become an artist?
I was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents and we moved to London when I was still a baby. Growing up I was very shy, and drawing for me was my crutch in most situations. It seemed natural for me to go to art college, but it wasn’t an option at the time. I ended up doing languages which was tough because of how shy I was, but I imbibed a lot of literature and found myself particularly drawn to French feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Hélène Cixous and women writers such as Colette, Amélie Nothomb, and Nina Bouraoui. Upon graduating I worked briefly in Belgium and then moved to China where I taught for a few years. During that time, I was able to travel a bit around China and other parts of Asia, which was an inspiring, eye-opening experience.
China is a fascinating country which I still feel some attachment to, but I couldn’t really see myself settling there, so I returned to London. By then I was 30, going through a quarter/mid-life crisis and I finally realised that I had to go back to making art. I started off doing a few evening classes, and eventually enrolled on the Contemporary Portrait Diploma at the Art Academy London. There I really honed my drawing and painting skills, but I also saw that a lot of my experiences as a woman in Asia together with the literature I’d studied at university were all relevant to the content and aesthetic that I was creating. The portraits of the women I painted are braver versions of me in a way.
Right now, I’m working towards an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds Art School. East Asian female identity is still at the core of my work, but the focus is more on women, pleasure, and consumption.
What or who inspires you?
Many things and many people: the chaos and heat of Asian cities, good food and drink, the feeling of tipsiness, friendships past and present, disco, new wave, and anything I can dance to, mismatched and heavily patterned fabrics, saturated colours, flowers, cats, ukiyo-e, Balthus, Klimt, Liu Xiaodong, Araki Nobuyoshi, Mickalene Thomas, the writings of Colette and Amelie Nothomb, Wendy Steiner’s The Trouble with Beauty, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, the films of Anna Biller and Jacques Demy, and many more…
A post shared by Caroline Wong (@carolinewong_art) on Apr 8, 2020 at 1:18pm PDT
What is the most important story you would like to convey in your art?
If there is a message or story to convey, it’s simply the freedom and courage for women (including myself) to be themselves and not feel hemmed in in any way. That’s why I began by portraying East Asian women with a strong sense of style, who didn’t conform to what’s expected of them and who exude confidence and authority. Now I’m more drawn to this theme of eating, drinking, partying, and giving yourself that permission to fully enjoy yourself while not caring what others think.
“This was partly motivated by the difference I noticed between male and female friends, particularly in Asia. A lot of the men I knew seemed far less inhibited in the way they ate or drank whereas a lot of my female friends were often very image or weight conscious and couldn’t let themselves go. So in my paintings, I wanted to reverse that and show women totally immersed in their own pleasure and forgetting all rules of etiquette and decency”.
Image and copyright: Caroline Wong
What form of activism do you portray in your art?
Over the past couple of years I’ve struggled to align my work with activism or politics. It may appear to be political because I’ve painted outspoken women such as Cindy Gallop or Victoria Sin and there are obvious feminist influences. But over time I’ve realised my practice has primarily been a way for me to deal with very personal issues. Really I just see my work as a celebration of Asian women in their diversity and women who aren’t afraid to be themselves. This goes back to that idea mentioned earlier of feeling free and living without restrictions. That’s the main message I want to give and one I myself am trying to follow.
Do you think your art important in this era?
I don’t think my art will change the world but I’ve always felt that there haven’t been many East Asian artists telling their stories through art especially in the UK, or if there have been, we just don’t see them very often.
“And in the context of East Asian art, there have been plenty of images of women, but few women artists. So my paintings are partly a response to both these issues and I’d be curious to see how or if people in the East and the West respond to my work.”
You like to depict women eating food in your art, why is this?
I’ve always made my art with an awareness that a lot of the images of women in East Asian art (usually made by male artists) portray women as silent, passive, and obedient and that the trope of the emaciated beauty is still prevalent in East Asian culture. Through my practice i’m finding ways of redefining and diversifying depictions of female beauty and one way of doing this is to have women shamelessly indulging in food and drink. I saw it as a form of rebellion against the rules of propriety and self-control and also an act of self-sufficiency in the search for pleasure. The theme of women and eating as protest has been dealt with before and we see this in Evelyne Axell’s Ice-cream, Vera Chytilová’s Daisies, Natalia LL’s Consumer Art, and Roxana Halls’ Appetite series. All of these together with the recent mukbang craze have been of interest to me.
A post shared by Caroline Wong (@carolinewong_art) on Oct 28, 2019 at 10:08am PDT
What emotion do you want to evoke in the person viewing your art?
Hopefully joy, freedom, and beauty.
How can we support the Caroline Wong?
I take on portrait commissions and also sell some of my paintings as giclée prints, so if anyone is interested, please get in touch here . I also plan to have exhibitions when the time is right.
You can also follow me via Instagram and my website:
Website: Caroline Wong Art
Instagram: @Carolinewong_art
What quote or phrase describes Caroline Wong?
I can't answer this!
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