Yvonne Feng
Ahead of our inaugural exhibition, She Performs (London Gallery West, June 2018), we invited four of the participating artists - Pauline Batista, Yvonne Feng, Susanne Roewer and Jocelyn McGregor - to speak to our curators about their practice, and how gender, performance, and the body inform their work...
Artist Yvonne Feng spoke to our curator, Lynn Seraina Battaglia.
LSB: As a participating artist, what does She Performs mean to you?
YF: When I first saw the title She Performs, I think what caught my eye is ‘She.’ Because in a way it identifies the gender, as woman [sic]. So then for me I think about myself as a woman, about how I perform my work. And then it made me think about how I use female body a lot in my work. That’s kind of how the female body performs for me. But now, when I think about it, it’s the integration of both.
In a way it’s through painting and it’s through how I use the body - the body is not only the figuration of a female body, it’s also the body of paint, my own body when I paint, and the sensation of both the figuration and the paints that arise through the process of painting. For me, I think they also work as a reflection back to me and make me think about my situation in the real world, like how I perform myself. Like in specific events or situation, the bodies in the works sort of reflect back to me in relation to my own.
LSB: As an artist, as a woman, how do you perform ‘yourself’?
YF: I guess for a lot of situations it might be difficult to say ‘oh, this is how I would behave’. I guess, what I’m trying to do through the expression using the medium of painting is thinking about how painting conveys meaning through a kind of ambiguity of imagery. And it’s through the kind of sensation that the painting is able to evolve.
So, it’s how a painting can open up emotional and meaningful engagement to make you think about - it’s not really directly making a statement about a particular event or situation in the real world, but it’s through this kind of fictional construction and through the emotional engagement in the painting - like when I paint or a viewer engages in the painting. And then reflect back on the body or the situation.
LSB: How does ‘the body’ inform your work?
YF: I think, for me it’s the way I inhabit the narrative - because I mostly work from narrative. So the way I relate my body with the work, it’s through inhabiting this kind of fictional scenario. It’s not just an illustration of narrative, so in a way, it’s not only inhabiting this kind of figurative body. I also, through my body, feel the movement of the grass, which is a different sensation to the kind of interwoven, you know, movement of the body, and also I feel the sensation of the barbed wires, which I guess suggests the suppressed or violent aspect of it, but then also the body itself in juxtaposition to all these elements, which brings out the complex relation among all these elements. It’s not just a direct illustration of the body doing this kind of gesture. So in a way, it’s through the body of paint that I feel or I construct the scenario through the feeling of it.
Climax a Victory, 2017
“I also, through my body,
feel the movement of the grass...the sensation of
the barbed wire”
