East West Lifestyle
Agnes A List: Artist Interview with Dominique Fung
By Agnes Lew
Second generation Chinese Canadian artist Dominique Fung’s works draw from her Cantonese roots and the experience of being Asian in the Western world. Her paintings are a bricolage of ancestral memory, history, artifacts, allegories and the repurposing of ideas.
“Dominique’s compositions are at once haunting and enchanting, not to mention delicious!” says Agnes Lew, East West Bank’s senior vice president and head of private banking. “I immediately fell in love with her depictions of food, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface as well. Referencing art history movements globally, her paintings offer subtle, wry commentary on the way the West sees the East, and how she sees herself within this dichotomy.”
In collaboration with the Gallery Association Los Angeles, Lew is interviewing prominent artists in the art world during the pandemic to showcase their work. Over 80 galleries have united to create an online space called Gallery Platform LA to provide art aficionados around the world a way to virtually enjoy and engage with art. Gallery Platform LA features 10 gallery “viewing rooms,” along with a selected project that rotates every eight weeks. East West Bank is a proud sponsor of Gallery Platform LA.
In this edition of Lew’s artist series, she speaks with Fung about “It’s Not Polite to Stare,” her recent exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. The artist’s recent works are influenced by Dunhuang frescoes on the Silk Road and other displaced objects from Asia in The Metropolitan Museum’s collection. She opens a two-person exhibition with Katherina Olschbaur this fall at Galeria Nicodim in Bucharest, and her second solo exhibition with Nicodim Los Angeles in February 2022.
