Spotlight Artist

Lily Wong

Northeast
Artist profile photo
Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

 Pulling from the hyperbolic vernacular of cartooning and illustration, my work engages with the digestibility of representational images and the way they can be subverted and redirected towards a pliable, psychological interiority. Elements of drama and fantasy are woven into improbable vignettes that offer a glimpse into a constantly fluctuating emotional landscape shaped by a sense of displacement, loss, and yearning.

Often engaged in acts of close looking and intimate contact, the figures in my work occupy narratives that invoke a sense of anxiety around the constructs that structure, inscribe, and erase bodies. Centered around a reimagination of personhood at the moment it becomes undone, the subjects probe the way literal and metaphorical fracturing influences the body’s relationship to pain, intimacy, desire, and structures of power. In contrast to the gentleness of their touch, the figures’ balloon-like bodies act as overstuffed containers that are on the edge of bursting and potential destruction, articulating a disconnect between external presentation and private experience.

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