Artist Reflects on Unusual Life

Su-en Wong may claim that she is “just starting,” but her budding career as a visual artist shows amazing depth and maturity for a self-proclaimed beginner.

Wong, whose work has already been exhibited in New York, Chicago and Korea, spoke about her life and career last Thursday at the Carpenter Center before an audience of students and art enthusiasts.

Wong prefaced the discussion of her work by first describing her “brief” childhood, in which she was taught to “strive for very Western ideals and Western standards and a Western set of what was right and wrong, in terms of beauty and morality,” in the midst of an Eastern culture.

She was constantly afraid of failure, and leaving Singapore for the United States at the age of sixteen to study piano only made her feel more insecure.

Wong attributes the conflict and sense of duality pervasive in her work to this difficult period.

She was convinced that she would pursue her parents’ dream of her being a concert pianist until her senior year of college in the United States, when she first began expressing herself through art.

Wong’s process for creating her paintings is unique: she coats 6-by-9 foot sheets of paper with multiple layers of house paint.

Then, like she did as a child, she lies on the floor on her belly and draws on top of the painted paper with colored pencils.

Wong always places herself in her paintings, calling this an outlet for both her pent-up emotions and what she is feeling at the time.

A common element in her newer works, Wong chooses to depict many replicas of her own figure in order to represent all of the layers of the self that can be explored. Rather than exclude the viewer from the artist, Wong’s technique manages to draw in the public and encourages them to empathize with her experiences through her work.

The names of her paintings come from the monochromatic backgrounds she often creates. For example, “Return to Paradise,” named for its Benjamin Moore paint color, depicts multiple images of Wong in an oasis, sitting on rocks and swimming in a clear blue pool.

Throughout Wong’s career, her paintings have changed to reflect the way she has evolved as a person. Her earliest works depict dolls configured in various positions, a focus Wong attributes to her too-brief childhood.

Later paintings spotlighted herself, naked except for a ribbon hanging around her neck, which was representative of her “obsession with winning.” Now, Wong’s paintings are “fun, happy, probably less formal than before,” as she describes them, often featuring multiple versions of herself in paradise.

With a new show opening soon in Chicago, Wong is uncertain as to what the future will bring, though she hopes to use her success and the broadening of her audience to reshape the image of the Asian woman in the public’s eyes.

Wong describes the viewpoint as being “still very backward, dictated by male desire.”

“It’s interesting that we have these models of what is ideal, and it doesn’t deviate from that very much… It’s hard being a part of this icon. How can we do that? And yet we still want that. It’s a weird sort of duality,” she says.