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New Drawings
November 9 - December 21, 2007
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The exhibition consists of fourteen large-scale graphite drawings on paper that, like Su-en Wong’s paintings, demonstrate a rare technical virtuosity and a meticulous attention to detail. The works continue Wong’s investigation of the “self” within complex worlds that embrace contradiction as a condition of existence – eroticism and innocence, humor and pathos, the individual and everywoman, fantasy and reality.
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In her work, Su-en Wong stages an elaborate and personal theater of the self that performs and challenges notions of identity formation via the conventional channels of nationality, race, gender, adolescence, age, costume, and sexuality. The spaces of her drawings allude to a stage set in their suggestive incompleteness; the flatness of the bare support is activated by select prop-like spatial elements or decorative marginalia that imply an only partially depicted fairytale scene.... The exuberant playfulness and humor readily apparent is also the sugar-coating of a more bitter pill.Alternately desirable and disturbing, gentle and jarring, universal traits and shared human impulses are laid bare. Wong speaks critically to the uncanny that resonates through forms of fantasy and folly.1
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Born in Singapore in 1973, Wong came to the United States at the age of sixteen. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Canada, including a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas. Wong lives and works in New York City.
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1 Lehrer-Graiwer, Sarah. “Su-en Wong” in Su-en Wong: New Drawings. New York: Danese, 2007. |
