Dominique Fung: This week's art discovery

Dominique Fung started her career painting in a nail salon basement. Today, she is one of the most impressive young painters in New York City. She is only 31, but the artist already has a career many others would be jealous of. Fung is a second-generation immigrant who did not go to an Ivy League school, and did not have unlimited monetary support. 

Dominique Fung signing her print “Midnight Catch”. Photo by Nicodim Gallery 

Her work focuses on her own experiences, growing up as a Chinese woman in the Western world. Some of her most popular paintings are her portraits of traditional objects like vases and porcelains. She does not simply show them, but she also gives them meaning and emotions. This is her way of giving back some power to the Diaspora. Those objects express the way the West tends to fetichise her culture as exotic.

One of our favourite portraits is very recent and called "Double Happiness". Fung painted it in 2021 as a way for her to process her surroundings. It was born after she saw the windows of her favourite Asian restaurant in New York City vandalised. The painting shows two blue and white vases protected by glass cases. Each case has a bullet hole in it to represent the violence experienced at the time of the attack.

Fung does not want to limit her craft and does not see herself as just a painter. We agree with her, she is a Chinese-Canadian artist who lives as a daughter, a friend, a teacher, a student and much more. A single medium could never fully describe all of her lived experiences, past, present and future. We cannot wait to see her work as she experiences and grows with her own identity and her artistic persona.

The New York based artist is truly one of a kind. She expresses in her craft, what a thousand words could not. We believe she is creating a path for young BIPOC artists everywhere, to help them understand their own realities, and to show them how far hard work can take you. 

Blank Round is a bridge between cultures, at the intersection between craft and heritage.

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