Fu-On Chung
What was your first memory of an artwork?
I watched my father paint a landscape as I was growing up, it was a landscape he painted from a photograph in our sunroom. This painting had a flowing body of water, foliage and glistening hilltops in the distance. This painting has changed locations throughout the years, it is currently in the dining room of my family home.
How did it affect you?
This artwork represented the story of my father, through this painting he told me the story of himself as a young man in mainland China who clearly had the requisite talent to become an artist but sadly lacked the money and status to get admitted into Art School. In a way, the experience of this artwork is bound to the story it represented. This was a story of potential or dreams left unfulfilled.
Fu-On Chung, Heart to Break, (2019) Oil on Canvas 1360x1680mm Image Credit: William Normyle ~
What was the first artwork you remember making?
I was in kindergarten when I became enamoured with a picture book which I vaguely remember as being about a mouse in search of a wedge of cheese. This mouse adventured around the confines of a suburban house with this wedge of cheese seemingly on the move. I recreated this picture book at home with colouring pencils and paper – I felt a profound sense of joy and achievement at recreating this picture book.
Moving to your current practice – What – and/or whom-would you identify as being of significant influence upon your work?
I enjoy the practice of the London-based Phoebe Unwin for her varied approach to image-making. Unwin describes her images as a sensory encounter of events and spaces as opposed to a painted rendering of such situations. What I find most influential about her practice is the complex relationship between the forms and motifs that float within the illusionistic spaces of her images. The New York based Katherine Bernhardt produces clunkily rendered paintings of pop cultural icons which speak to the contemporary vernacular. What is of most significance within Bernhardt’s paintings is the illusionistic space which is decisively thin, and whilst I have never seen them in the flesh it is through the backlit illumination of my computer screen that these images dazzle.
You are currently based between New Zealand and Australia? What influence do you think regularly moving between 2 geographic locations has on your work?
Moving between these two geographic locations has truly emphasised that what influences my practice is the way that images, reproductions, films and advertisements arise into my field of vision through backlit illuminated pixels. It has become clear that the all-encompassing internet has become quite the flattening device in terms of filtering images, colours and forms into my field of vision.
Your practice currently engages with abstraction that expresses the gesture. Do you see it departing significantly from painters such as de Koonig and – the more minimalist Raoul de Keyser?
In short – not really.
I have a deep, deep appreciation for the seemingly frenzied scumbled marks of De Kooning, His paintings seem to have a vivacious energy which stands in for the hand of the artist. What I appreciate most about a De Kooning is contrasted by what I’m interested in Raoul de Keyser. I find de Keyser’s compositional decisions mesmerising and magnetic, I imagine the painter at his easel making pensive and poetic decisions around colour and form. I like to give myself as much visual freedom as possible within my practice to adopt both approaches.
Your works are larger in scale – how important is creating an intimate experience with the observer for you? On the flipside, how do you think immersing the viewer in a painter works in these times of immersive technology?
One of my undergrad painting tutors at AUT in Auckland Amber Wilson described her own paintings in relation to scale and marks as wanting an experience for the viewer where they were ‘tickled by the detail yet punched by the whole’.
That phrase has stuck with me, particularly when I have been making larger images.
When creating my larger paintings they are roughly the scale of my body (as my arm span is just wide enough to carry each painting). By default, an intimate experience is created as the scale of the marks and forms are proportionate to the average person (I’m very average!). The viewer is looking/observing the painting, and the painting is talking back to the viewer.
To your second point, whilst illuminated pixels have been an influence within my paintings I still believe that painting is fundamentally analogue compared to immersive technology. So in a way, pigment applied to a substrate via the hand of the artist may seem fundamentally anachronistic.
You refer to your works and to the artist sometimes as “playing the fool?” what is the importance of humour and self parody to you?
Painting for me is very much about having (dare I say it) fun.
So I would say that articulating humour and self-parody within painting would be to allow myself a level of visual freedom where nothing seems too silly or too verbose. To talk about the importance of these ideas is in a way talking about the approach to the process of painting in which I am engaging so as not to predetermine the final destination of the image.
Fu-On Chung: installation image (2019).
Your works explore colour, texture and overpainting – do you see ci them as existing in a continuum -ie how does one relate to the other? Are they a conversation? A narrative? Do they relate to what is going on in your physical or psychic environment?
I would say that these elements you point out, colour, texture and overpainting exist as a conversation. As I make a colour decision, I evaluate and respond to the conditions present and make textural decisions and potentially layer and layer until the painting reaches a sort of resolution/irresolution. I would say that these decisions respond and relate to the digital environment in which I am immersed in, where images and videos arrive into this physical environment at a ‘fast’ pace.
(Cover credit: Hang with Me, 2019 Oil on Canvas 1360x1680 Image Credit: William Normyle )
