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Wong’s ‘Girls Who Devour’ not only evade being consumable objects, they evade the act of shrinking away. They assert their presence until we can almost hear shrieks of laughter escaping the frames. Wong’s past selves saturate her drawings and, of the lively series ‘Cats and Girls’ she tells me: “It’s so sentimental. I’m really embarrassed to be saying this: it was just a tribute to my childhood cat and to being a young girl. It was about acting without inhibitions and not thinking, ‘Oh, I’m eating way too much’ or, ‘Oh, I look fat’ or anything like that. Because when you’re a child, you don’t think about those things.”
Influenced by French impressionist Pierre Bonnard, Wong works multiple layers into several paintings at once, a process which sometimes takes as long as seven months to a year to complete. Pastel strokes shift into focus in some areas and slip off the page in others. Wong’s choice to base her practice on pastel drawings is also derived from her childhood. She explains, “It’s such a tactile medium and the way I draw, it’s not very precious or detailed or focused. When I start, I just make this huge mess in charcoal and I’m not thinking about whether the proportions are right. Form just emerges. It’s just going back into this state of play and girlhood and making a mess. I love making a mess. Just this big colorful mess, that’s what I always did as a child.”
“Devouring a bucket of fried chicken or a weird dessert. It appeals to the little girl in me, ‘That’s so pretty. I want to eat it.’ That kind of thing.”
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