Hungover with Leopolda Eating McDonald’s, 2022SIMON VERES © 2024 Faye Wei Wei, courtesy of Kandlhofer gallery.
In her teens, Wei Wei’s teachers encouraged her to start using oil paint rather than the easier to work with acrylic. “We’d use Liquin, which is quite toxic, goopy stuff. My teacher called it marmalade,” she said of the paint she still uses to this day. She has exhibited her work at London’s Cob Gallery and Vienna’s Galerie Kandlhofer, and has taken part in several major fashion collaborations with the designer Simone Rocha. “I love her sense of romanticism,” she says.
Lately, though, as she prepares to move to America in August, where she’ll pursue her MFA at Yale, Wei Wei finds herself returning to the park opposite her home. She’s been collecting “loads of dandelions” and has made a drawing out of their seeds. She returned from a recent holiday to find them drooping over the edge of their pewter vase. “They’re almost like suspended wishes,” Wei Wei suggests.
The theme of flowers runs deep throughout Portals, though not in the way you’d expect. There are still lifes, sure, including one striking image of a pink, red, and blue bouquet almost catching fire in the dark—“that kind of quiet nocturnal time where it’s just the flowers on their own, in love with each other,” she says. “Their petals feel like they’re blushing.” But flowers also punctuate intimate portraits of her close friends, surround images of wild horses and somehow accentuate the mythological air of knights, swords and crosses, and slithering, red snake tongues that pop out of lover’s mouths. Wei Wei isn’t attracted to flowers because of their beauty, necessarily, but “the way they ignite a painting without the need for a figure” and allow her to communicate despair through beauty.
