Lily Wong

 

Lily Wong: I need to. The classics for me are Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. There’s a website of stills from Wong Kar-wai’s movies I use for color inspiration. But here’s the thing, I feel like such a fake [laughs]. I always feel like an outsider, like six-feet-removed from these experiences that I don’t necessarily have a physical history with but have a lot of attachment to. I love to look at all sorts of anime but I’m not invested in any storylines, I’m watching for the animation styles or the colors. Or in referencing Wong Kar-wai movies, I always get this imposter’s syndrome mixed with a false nostalgia because so many of his films are from a specific time and place in Hong Kong, where my dad grew up. I secretly associate feelings of home with it, but I’ve never been there, and I know very little about my dad’s family. It’s like being very hungry for something you have no ability to access, but knowing that part of it also is embedded in you. 

That’s true, and I’ve been trying to give myself more grace. I had such a hang-up about that in school, feeling I had to factually prove my reality like, “I know this lineage. I know this history. This is what I’m referencing.” That’s not necessarily my approach. I have what I’m interested in and create a whole fantasy around it. I get so deep into that fantasy that it becomes completely detached from the real thing.

 

I’m leaning into that more. The progress that I’ve made in the past year is because I haven’t had the noise of school in the background, and not having to defend myself in class, where it feels like everyone wants you to have this incredibly synthesized view of your work and interests. 

 

I love Japanese woodblock prints and Mughal-illustrated manuscripts, stuff that pulls from folklore and Eastern mythology. Cave paintings, too. I’m also very drawn to imagery that’s rooted in pop culture aesthetics of of our childhood, especially cartoons, but the way we’ve been taught to think about any of that is completely divorced from “art” or painting with a capital P. It’s all outside the Western canon of art, which was rarely the dominant lens I was looking through. I never really know how to explain why I’m so drawn to paper, but I’ve been thinking about that a lot more lately, and how paper is foundational to so much of what I’m interested in. From my educational experience, few people talked about these ways of making in terms that school validates. I don’t know how to talk about Sailor Moon academically, but I know something important is there! Millions of people globally love that aesthetic.

 

That was the earliest thing I remember consuming on television.

 

Especially bright, saturated Pop-y colors—there wasn’t room for that, but a lot has shifted since then. In my work, I’m trying to embed this radiating glow that I realized comes from television screens. I tried to exactly color copy a still from Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels. I held swatches to the screen and everything matched, but it wasn’t working because so much of that glow is the way the device creates and projects the light. 

 

The glow when my work was only in black was just the stark white of the paper. I started diving into color shortly after I switched from ink to acrylic. I felt all this pressure—I tried a couple things on linen, which I hated. It’s not the same. This year, having to get to know paper again through a different medium, and using color, I feel like I understand it better, and what its function is. Some woodblock printing is like that too, really thin layers of color, printed on top of each other. 

 

I’ve been looking at Yoshitoshi’s 100 Aspects of the Moon series. Each print is based on historical anecdotes or mythology, and I love how the intensity and energy of each story is captured so elegantly on this fragile paper. There’s one print depicting the goddess Chang’e fleeing to the moon after stealing the elixir of life, which is sort of beautiful and romantic. But in several versions of this story, her now immortal life is spent on the moon, forever making the potion with her rabbit companion. It’s quite Sisyphian, this unattainable elixir. 

 

I think many modes of Asian art making are not a quick read. With Mughal manuscript paintings, the narrative isn’t on a singular plane. It’s embedded in multiple perspectives and timelines smushed together. Or with Chinese scroll paintings, it’s like a slow circular read where absence or negative space is what activates minute details. This concept of the essence is super important, capturing something that is ephemeral. I think that’s why I love drawing and the language of cartooning. It’s so digestible, but what you see is hardly ever what you get. 

 

That’s what I’ve been finding really exciting about color. In the past two years, my work has had a big scale shift, and I’ve zoomed in from multiple narratives into more singular ones. I’ve had some guilt about that because I felt like I was conceding this part of image making that’s really important to me, like hiding these Easter eggs that create this cyclical read. Especially when the work was still just black and white, it really felt like something got lost. But, moving into color, especially yellow, was a spark. Color is where the narrative subtleties are being embedded now. Color changes the way an image reorients your eyes when navigating a space. When I was working smaller and in a different compositional style, I could insert everything I was thinking about but I’ve really had to rein that in.

 

Before, there was so much ornamentation and adornment used as cultural signifiers, but I felt like that was setting the undertone of the work in a very restrictive way. Yellow can be used as the same sort of thing while also activating and navigating its position in our collective cultural memory. It also functions as a visual tool, light-wise.

Stain, yes. Residue, remnants... I’m super interested in the Veil of Veronica right now and the idea of this leftover imprint of a face being a “true” representation of the actual person. The cowgirl piece (Contact) is the most explicit use of yellow. Using yellow as a descriptor for people is still so tainted by its violent history. But “Asian-American” is too vague and I can’t possibly pin it down. For myself, yellow is actually very accurate and speaks to my own history, and I almost can’t use it because it makes other people so uncomfortable. So it’s not really a reclaiming, but a reinforcement of its existence. 

 

I also think about the Korean concept of han as a repetition of suffering, another type of cultural stain. In carrying that, you’re always revisiting this site of conflict or injury or pain. But to exit that site means having to go back through the way you came. I think maybe that’s the function of yellow in my work. I get nervous though, because that’s a piece of myself I don’t want to give too much of because people will hold on to that really hard. That’s where the title for my most recent show, I Wasn’t There, came from. Whenever you reach a sort of understanding or feeling of resolution, there’s always something else to disrupt and unmake that sense of self. In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes about often existing in this place of conflict and of having to hold multiple truths at once. I think that’s a super uncomfortable place for people to exist. We want things to be binary, and nothing is. 

 

...Like “wipe your hands,” done. That's a challenge I’m trying to navigate. For the longest time, I avoided talking about any of this, because then I’m pigeon-holed. It gets especially fuzzy when it comes to Asian-American identity, because it occupies this enormous swath of in-between space of hypervisible non-existence. 

 

How do I talk about trauma and give just the right amount? Because once you reveal it, it’s so hard to walk it back. I feel like whatever direction I choose, there’s always another part of myself that’s being denied. I did a studio visit today and wondered how much am I going to tell this person? 

It’s just opening the door, but people get stuck there. And even when you express this frustration with trauma-gazing, then that gets framed as “the thing.” It’s a loop. In school I was trying to package everything in a linear way. I’m trying to now have a more instinctual conversation with different parts of myself and figure out the various access points I want to provide. 

 

You’re engaging with the idea or projection of this person. 

 

You’re going to love Chungking Express. It’s multiple parallel stories with no real conclusions. Even the synopsis doesn’t capture it because it’s experiential. The main characters’ stories are almost completely separate, except for several brief, shared encounters. And their relationships to each other are mostly through fragments of the other person or fragments of shared space. Within those tiny slivers of urban space are these narratives around longing, desire and aching, all allowed to exist in the muddiness. This thing we are trying to grasp at, the second you have it, it’s out of your reach again. There’s an awareness of that—it’s not trying to be tidy. 

 

This concept of hybrid, fragmented selves is always present and I think of that black-and-white work as another split self. Those aspects of the self are always in flux, but it’s never the singular unified self that reorients to various environments. It’s the multiple consciousnesses all reorienting at the same time, like the Coney Island ferris wheel. Not all the carts are stationary. Some do a scary thing where they move as the wheel is going around. You’ve got your whole container of self in motion, and then within that there are different components also in motion. 

 

My first Covid painting. 

 

The figures in the earlier pieces are more distorted and bulbous. I initially thought of them as balloons filled with this tension that could explode. Lately it’s lost a lot of that… still malleable but not as overstuffed. I think that’s been a little transition.

 

When I finished Covered, I revisited Parachute and saw it as an activator. At first I felt that I had to make everything weird and twisty, but then it made me think of the ways that the body can be distended or extended outside of the physical frame. 

 

You know Maia Ruth Lee? I loved her Bondage Baggage series documenting luggage during her travels back to Nepal. It triggered my own memories, especially from the ’90’s when there was a large wave of Korean immigration. Every time I’d be at the airport, there were always loads of bags and boxes tied with string, all this life stuffed into smushed packages. When we visited family, our bags looked like this too. We were transporting our American life in these bags for our family to consume and yearn for. 

 

In My Past Lives, the twine is actually her braid. In less exaggerated ways, the body is distorting itself. Those balloons had their place and maybe they will come back, but I didn't want that possibility to become so rigid. 

 

I think it’s also the printmaker problem solver in me that’s like, “Well, I’ve put acid on this and can’t really reverse it,” so it’s half, “How do I trust the technical part,” and half, “How do I trust my gut?” That kind of mirrors what the work is about too. 

 

Surprises come out of that process. What I like most in the idea stage is what I hate most in the end. I don’t often plan colors ahead of time. I just go for it, do one part and respond. 

 

I think it’s because we’re the kind of people who overthink, and it’s sort of like you have to run into the cold ocean or you’re never going to actually get in the water. 

 

That was a driving force behind Reach Out. I was like, this cannot be a fucking Hulk drawing! I made a green person. It’s chunky. I was so determined for it not to be that.