Drawn Out Exhibition Catalogue Essay by Huma Kabakci
“I went to collect the few personal belongings which…I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.” (Colette)
The earliest Chinese paintings and drawings of female figures, dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618–907), were rather didactic, illustrating exemplary women engaged in duties and activities appropriate to their designated station in life according to patriarchal Confucian principles{1}. The portrayal of Asian women has only been challenged in more recent artistic practice. Breaking the boundaries of this ideology, Caroline Wong’s drawings recollect the pleasures of eating and drinking with friends, celebrating conviviality whilst also critiquing sexism in East Asian societies. Food for Wong is a subversive and emotional response to traditional, restricted representations of East Asian women, and she prioritises pleasure over polite customs.
For Wong, the act of drawing, much like eating and consuming, is sensuous and liberating: ‘When I started depicting women eating and getting drunk, it was really to show these women breaking out of the very constricted language of East Asian art. I wanted to break out of that in terms of the content.’{2} Whether found or taken directly from life models, the depiction of female friendships and female pleasure in food is a recurring theme in her work. Frenzied strokes of pigment typify her drawings, and this formal approach embellishes her subjects with added confidence, rebellion, and an emotional voluptuousness. These intimate drawings provide insight into the fantasies, enacted at night and in private spaces, of women normally constrained by tradition. The artist tends to work at night, during which her subjects materialise, morphing into desirable guiltless pleasures that might appear in one’s dreams. Drawing with pastel helps Wong to tap into primal, animal, or even childlike urges, and the artist enjoys manipulating the tactile medium with her hands. The ‘dog women’ of Paula Rego, an artist Wong admires, come to mind.
In her Scavengers (2020) drawing, the subjects take on the attributes of cats, who unashamedly lie on the dinner table, licking plates, and sleeping off the consumption of an excess of food and drink. The energetic lines that conjure her characters appear as “hungry” marks that are almost out of control. They convey an over-excitedness at the sight and taste of food, an impatient desire to eat and taste everything at once. Through touching, drinking, licking and consuming, the three women in Wong’s drawing forget about table manners, prioritising their own pleasure before anything else. Central to Wong’s work is a commitment to and celebration of childlike behaviour and hedonistic desire for fun, together with a right to female pleasure.
Huma Kabakci
Note: This essay was originally published for Drawing Room’s “Drawn Out” exhibition Catalogue.
{1} “Idealized Images: Depictions of Women in Later Chinese and Korean Paintings.” East Asian Art Program at Harvard University, Dec. 2016, eaa.fas.harvard.edu/idealized-images-depictions-women-later-chinese-and-korean-paintings.
{2} Caroline Wong, in conversation with the author, 16 June 2021
