Caroline Wong – Picnics and Parties
05.04 – 04.05.2024, Belenius
Private View – Thursday 04.04 at 6-8 PM
Picnics and Parties is about the escapist pleasures of consumption and intoxication. It depicts the ‘artificial paradise’, to quote the Decadent poet Baudelaire, of alcohol, cigarettes, food, and companionship, but also that of clashing patterns, lurid colours, and iridiscent hues. The decorative becomes ‘drunk’, the ornamental detail dissolves into frenetic daubs, and artifice blends decadently with sensuality. Building up layers over several months, Wong works oil paint, oil pastel, and fluorescent pigments with brushes and her hands, combining hazy, fizzy scribbles with more lush, exuberant passages of paint. In our talk, she cites Intimist painter Bonnard as a key influence. He worked slowly and tactilely to ‘recover the savour of things’ — to relish a singular moment, extracting the magical and sensorial from the banal. Ultimately, in an age of decisiveness and efficiency, Wong opts for a protracted, indulgent process that favours an aesthetic of luxuriance and excess.
– Cathrin Mayer, 2024
Caroline Wong (b. 1986, Ipoh, Malaysia)
Lives and works in London, UK
Wong’s work responds to traditional, 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.
Wong received her MA from City and Guilds of London Art School in 2021. Prior to that, she received her Diploma in Contemporary Portraiture from The Art Academy in 2018. Solo exhibitions include Castello di San Basilio, Pisticci, Italy, Rusha & Co., Los Angeles (2023), Soho Revue, London, Soy Capitán, Berlin (2022). She has been shown at several international fairs and was one of the selected artists in Whitechapel's auction in 2024. In Sweden, her work has been shown in the group exhibition You Were Bigger Than the Sky, You Were More Than Just a Short Time, 2023.
