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25周年紀念號登場！

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Asia Art Archive: 25 Years of Documenting Asian Art

Dominique Fung, a Canadian artist with Hong Kong and Shanghai roots, unveils a captivating exploration of history, myth, and memory in her first Hong Kong solo exhibition, Beneath the Golden Canopy. Centering on the polarizing Empress Dowager Cixi, Dominique's paintings and artifacts delve into power, femininity, and the fluidity of historical narratives. Shaped by her diasporic identity and reflections on colonial storytelling, Dominique's work challenges viewers to question the myths and omissions behind inherited stories. In this exclusive Q&amp;A with JESSICA, Dominique reveals the inspirations behind her layered reimagining of the past.<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/Profile_Picture_b72f8dd962.jpeg" alt="Profile Picture.jpeg"></figure>Q: Your exhibition, Beneath the Golden Canopy, centers on Empress Dowager Cixi, a polarizing historical figure. What inspired you to focus this exhibition on her story, and how did your personal experiences—such as childhood memories of period dramas, your diasporic identity, and reflections on colonial narratives—shape your portrayal of her?A: Empress Dowager Cixi has always fascinated me. Growing up watching period dramas, she was either a ruthless villain or a tragic figure - rarely anything in between. That binary way of seeing power stuck with me. Being part of the diaspora also made me more aware of how history is framed, whose stories get flattened or reshaped to fit a narrative. With this show, I wanted to give her space to exist in all her contradictions - to be both mythical and human, feared and revered - while exploring how her story has been warped, retold, and reconstructed over time.Q: &nbsp;In The She Dragon, The Fragile Phoenix, and The Limping Dragon, you use vivid color for the empresses while the emperor appears in monochrome. What inspired this visual distinction, and how does it reflect your perspective on historical power dynamics?A: In The She Dragon, The Fragile Phoenix, and The Limping Dragon, Emperor Xianfeng is drained of color, fading into a monochrome wash, while the empresses radiate in rich, layered hues. It’s a reversal of how power is traditionally portrayed - emperors are often seen as these solid, immovable forces in history, while women are depicted as ornamental, secondary. But in reality, figures like Cixi were constantly shifting, adapting, outmaneuvering the structures designed to contain them. The color in my paintings reflects that - it’s dynamic, alive, in flux. The emperor, by contrast, is stagnant, a ghost of authority rather than an active force.<img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503_003_fcdfe1b157.jpg" alt="MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503-003.jpg">Q: You’ve included artifacts like a carpet from Cixi’s court and a series of 20th-century jewelry boxes in the exhibition. How do these objects enhance the storytelling in your paintings, and what do they reveal about your exploration of history and womanhood? A: I wanted something of hers in the room - something that had literally been beneath her feet. The carpet from Cixi’s court isn’t just decor, it’s a witness. While the jewerly boxes, often dismissed as frivolous or feminine, actually carry entire histories - of trade, of intimacy. They hold the personal within the political, the delicate within the powerful. To me, they’re reminders that history isn’t just in grand palaces and official records, it’s in the things we touch, the things we keep, the things that outlive us.<img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503_007_810f473b14.jpg" alt="MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503-007.jpg">Q: Your work blends historical references with fantastical elements, such as fish soldiers and crumbling architecture. How do you balance fact and fiction in your work, and what role does this interplay serve in challenging traditional narratives?A: For me, fact and fiction aren’t opposites - they’re tangled up in each other. History isn’t this neat, objective record; it’s full of contradictions, omissions, and reinterpretations, often shaped by whoever holds the pen. By blending in fantastical elements, I’m not inventing a new version of the past - I’m exposing its gaps, the places where the record frays or falters. Fantasy, in that sense, becomes a tool to challenge what we think we know, to remind us that history is always up for questioning.Q: The lighting in your paintings draws inspiration from Dutch masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt, using candlelight and shadow to guide the viewer. How do you decide which elements to illuminate or conceal, and what effect do you hope this has on how people interpret your art?A: Light is a guide - it tells the viewer where to look. I love the way painters like Vermeer and Rembrandt used light not just to illuminate, but to create a sense of mystery. Shadows hold just as much meaning as the things we see clearly.<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503_001_41308fa75e.jpg" alt="MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503-001.jpg"></figure>Q: Your palette has evolved from Tang dynasty ceramics to weathered, earthy tones. What does this shift signify for you, and how does it connect to your exploration of history’s erosion, reinterpretation and transformation?A: I started out painting with the glazes of Tang Dynasty funerary objects in mind, those rich, glossy surfaces frozen in time. But the more I painted, the more my palette started shifting on its own. I became drawn to the way things age - how objects buried in the earth or lost to the sea take on these beautifully unpredictable patinas. Colors wear down, get murky, oxidize. So, over time, my work started picking up these rusty ambers, moody grays, deep greens - tones that feel like they’ve lived through something. It wasn’t intentional at first, but looking back, it makes sense. I’m not interested in history as something fixed - I like how it erodes, transforms, gets retold. The colors started following that same logic.<img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503_009_6118dff020.jpg" alt="MASSIMODECARLO_DOMINIQUE_FUNG_202503-009.jpg">Q: You’ve said your work doesn’t aim to reconstruct Cixi’s world but to grapple with its myths, omissions and shifting interpretations. What do you hope viewers take away from peering “behind the golden curtain” of your paintings?A: I hope that viewers leave with more questions than answers. My work isn’t about reconstructing the world of Cixi in any definitive way - it’s about exploring the myths, omissions, and evolving interpretations that have shaped her story. I hope people will leave with a sense of how history is always in flux, how it’s shaped by those who have the power to tell it - and how, sometimes, the most interesting stories are the ones that remain obscured, just out of reach.Event Details Venue: MASSIMODECARLO, Shop 03-205A &amp; 205B &amp; 206, Second Floor, Barrack Block, Tai Kwun, No. 10 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong Date: March 24, 2025, to May 16, 2025For more information, contact the press office at <a href="mailto:press@massimodecarlo.com">press@massimodecarlo.com</a> or visit <a href="www.massimodecarlo.com">www.massimodecarlo.com</a>.&nbsp;

Caroline Tam

English Editor 

Q & A with Dominique Fung: Beneath the Golden Canopy

As of tomorrow, Jaffa Lam is no longer the academic head of Hong Kong Art School (HKAS). It's a place she's called home for the last 24 years, where she began as a part-time technician at the sculpture studio. She taught her final class last Thursday.In the same week, she made appearances at Art Central and Art Basel 2025, where her Mobile Wisdom was on display – a rainbow coloured bookshelf-cum-hammock made of recycled umbrella. Last weekend, she traveled to her exhibition in Shenzhen – her first solo museum show in over a decade featuring a handful of her residency projects from the last two decades.&nbsp;While colleagues lament her departure, Jaffa is eager to resume her role solely as an artist, free to continue her life-long mission of making art with marginal groups and free from the corporate duties that rewarded her with a stable salary to support her late mother's hefty medical bills. Ambitiously, she also wanted to throw herself into the deep end and see if her cross-disciplinary sculptures would sink or float in a city where they are scantily collected or understood.<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/20221012_A_Xjaffa12359_b616881fd1.jpg" alt="20221012AXjaffa12359.jpg"><figcaption>Jaffa’s ”Chasing an Elusive Nature” in 2022 at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong. Photo courtesy of Jaffa Lam</figcaption></figure>At 52 years old, Jaffa is still a rebel and dare-devil at heart.Though Jaffa's name is no stranger amongst corporations, museums, exhibitions, art festivals and artist residencies from Denmark to France, Germany to Japan, she only sold her first gallery piece at the age of 49 in a group show at Axel Vervoordt – serendipitously a year before she'd vow to "burn all the art pieces" and likely give up her art career had they remained unappreciated, collecting dust in her studio in Fo Tan."I wanted to burn them all in front of the Hong Kong Museum of Art because they never take my work," she laughs, half-jokingly.<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/20221012_A_Xjaffa12402_7acaf1b5c3.jpg" alt="20221012AXjaffa12402.jpg"><figcaption>Jaffa’s ”Chasing an Elusive Nature” in 2022 at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong. Photo courtesy of Jaffa Lam</figcaption></figure>The positive response from the group show saw a solo exhibition, also at the Wong Chuk Hang-based gallery, in 2022. Amidst her signature pieces made from upcycled wood and transformed industrial waste, Jaffa deliberately kept a gallery wall riddled with marks where "really expensive paintings" previously hung. After the exhibition, she pleaded to remove and include the wall as a part of the collection. Understandably, the staff brushed her off: what was she thinking?Then, gallery director Boris Vervoordt visited: he looked at the wall, toyed with her outrageous request for a few minutes and, much to the staff's surprise, said yes. The wall currently sits in Axel Vervoordt's archives while a work from the show – A Piece of Good Water III – found its home in M+ museum."What can I say, I am a rebel: I like to challenge people and institutions," says Jaffa.Such clout to go against the tides is the undercurrent of Jaffa's life. It peeled her away from her study of Chinese calligraphy and painting during her Bachelor of Arts, after a senior had told her she must learn under a master's tutelage for three decades before she could make a name for herself. Impatient, she shifted to Chinese rubbings, and, in the process of making its slabs, contemporary art.<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/jaffalam_1691167155_3162061744933816920_1592519221_e82c00ccff.jpg" alt="jaffalam_1691167155_3162061744933816920_1592519221.jpg"><figcaption>Photo from Instagram @jaffalam</figcaption></figure>The Bet that Changed Her Life One night after she landed in New York for what was a predominantly research trip in 2007 – seven years after attaining her Master of Fine Arts and Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong – she found respite at a Fujianese restaurant that served food from the region where she called home prior to the age of 12. Feeling nostalgic, she struck up a conversation with the owner, who couldn't fathom the possibility of a petite lady from his hometown as a successful artist."'People from Fujian don't become artists', he said," recalls Jaffa. "He'd believe me only if I showed in Chelsea (New York's art hub and home of the Gagosian Gallery)."She won the bet in just five months' time; and as a thank-you gift for the owner's motivation, she custom-made a few pieces for the restaurant. One of the most notable was a lit-up neon sign that read "we cook art here". Though the Chinese restaurant is now a cafe and the owner is long gone, the experience bookended her search for the kind of artist she had wanted to be: one that doesn't just work for communities, but with them to make art that bears meaning and connection &nbsp;– elements she, till this day, still value much more than pocketing big bucks.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/cookart01_7ddba21d74.jpg" alt="cookart01.jpg"><figcaption>Jaffa’s gift to a Fujianese restaurant after making a bet with the owner. Photo courtesy of Jaffa Lam</figcaption></figure>Such was her groundbreaking debut in Art Basel 2023's Encounters section – a 14-metre canopy of recycled umbrella fabric that's anchored onto six sculptures of industrial trolleys-cum-chairs. Titled Trolley Party, the piece was done in partnership with the craftswomen of the Hong Kong Women's Workers Association and highlights themes of unseen labour, identity and collectiveness of the city.The new-found spotlight pleased Jaffa, but not as much as seeing the children of the craftswomen playing under the mammoth piece that their mothers helped to create.<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/ABHK_23_EN_2_Axel1721_Kitmin_Lee_978aad3b0e.jpg" alt="ABHK23-EN2-Axel1721KitminLee.jpg"><figcaption>Jaffa’s “Trolley Party” at Art Basel 2023. Photo courtesy of Jaffa Lam</figcaption></figure>Admittedly, her motivation to work with varied communities stems from her trying childhood. After leaving a home of natural beauty in Fujian for Hong Kong in 1985, she and her family of four lived in an illegal structure on a rooftop in Kwun Tong's industrial area, where crime and discrimination were routine amongst new immigrants struggling with Cantonese. She was bullied in school and her parents were almost always working. To contribute, she took a cash-in-hand job at a garment factory, where she cut loose threads off the finished clothing, sometimes earning less than HK$1 per dozen pieces. Since she was underaged, she was shooed to hide whenever officers from the labour department came to conduct checks."The discrimination really hit me," says Jaffa. "Making art with these communities and seeing the women and the children realize their success at an event they'd otherwise never attend really helped release my anger and trauma."&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://prd-cdn.jessicahk.com/IMG_9634_1e9c8c0650.jpg" alt="IMG_9634.jpg"><figcaption>Jaffa’s “Seek Your Mountain” installation in Fujiyoshida city, Japan. Photo courtesy of Jaffa Lam</figcaption></figure>Despite her success, she still laments the limited power of artists in society without the money to spread their messages. While she's fortunate the galleries she's worked with aren't hooked on sales figures, she's not naive to the challenges of selling and understanding sizable sculptures in Hong Kong; but she's here to make the fight, free from the financial stability she's enjoyed for the past 24 years."People think I'm leaving HKAS because I've earned enough money, but that's far from the case. I want to test myself and the market: I've given myself a five-year timeline since selling my first piece in 2022, so we'll see."

Artist for the People: Jaffa Lam

Women in Art

JESSICA 會員

Women in Art