Caroline Wong • Cats and Girls • 16.09.–12.11.2022

Caroline Wong’s pastels of females and felines feasting together force a duality, eliciting a mixture of joy and revulsion, provoking pleasure with disgust. While nauseating, while dizzying, they are cathartic too, life-affirming. Her women: drunken, disheveled, shouting, on the verge of vomiting, spilling sauces, regurgitating soda, bent over the table, splayed out on the bed, kneeling on the floor, slurping, licking, chewing, consuming. We see how warped and uneasy women’s relationship to food is.

Wong takes up space, fills space and makes space, at a large scale. Themes around femininity, queerness, desire, and the right to female pleasure, pervade her pieces. Saturating each canvas, Wong’s mission is to fill that void, to feel no guilt or shame for taking what one needs and wants. But there is that anxiety too, the need to identify what one needs and wants, and the fear that this process of identification will be harder to achieve than one hoped. By taking control of their bodies and diets themselves, Wong’s women still feel out of control. The works signal a release, but with this release, comes also, a panic.

Read More: Full Press Release by Amelia Wilson

Biography

Caroline Wong

Caroline Wong’s work is enmeshed in itself, in herself, in the loudness and warmth of femme and queer culture. Her work is concerned with the corporeal, a study and celebration of female desire.  Referencing and dismantling traditional Asian woman gender roles, Wong paints her women flush with life and passion, full with joy and greed, replete with feeling. Themes around femininity, queerness, anxiety, and the right to female pleasure, pervade her large-scale pastel drawings. Her mission is to fill that void, to feel no guilt or shame for taking what one needs and wants.

Wong graduated with an MA in Fine Art from City and Guilds of London Art School in 2021. She also obtained a Diploma in Contemporary Portraiture from The Art Academy in 2018. Selected solo exhibitions include Seasons LA, Los Angeles (upcoming), Ojiri Gallery, London (upcoming), Artificial Paradises, Soho Revue, London (upcoming), and Cats and Girls, Soy Capitán, Berlin (2022). Selected group exhibitions include Angels with Dirty Faces, Ojiri Gallery, London (upcoming), Go Figure!, Daniel Raphael Gallery, London (2022), À La Carte, Tchotchke Gallery, New York (online, 2022), Eat Drink Man Woman, 180 Strand, London (2022), Lotus-Eaters, Indigo+Madder, London (2022), Friends and Family, Pi Artworks, London (2022), In the Land of Cockaigne, Quench Gallery, Margate (2022), The Dinner Table, San Mei Gallery, London (online, 2021), ING Discerning Eye, The Mall Galleries, London (2021), MA Show, City and Guilds of London Art School, London (2021), Drawn Out, Drawing Room, London (2021), Drawing Biennial 2021, Drawing Room, London (2021). Awards include the Drawing Room Biennial Bursary Award (2021), The Society of Women Artists Derwent Art Prize (2018), and the Liberty Specialty Markets Art Prize (2018).

Caroline Wong, born 1986, lives and works in London.