Luise Fong

INFO

Name	Luise Fong (she/her)
Born	1964
Country of Birth	Malaysia
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Malaysian Chinese, Pākehā
Dealer Gallery	Bergman Gallery
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Luise Fong is a Malaysian-born New Zealand artist known for her abstract yet gestural paintings in which a tension between opposites is often at play.

Moving to Aotearoa with her family as a child, Fong initially studied textile design at Wellington Polytechnic in 1983. After graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1989, she attained early success, with her work being included in important international exhibitions: Cultural Safety: Contemporary Art from New Zealand at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (1995) and Fusion: Hong Kong/Auckland artist exchange (1996). Alongside Yuk King Tan, Simon Kaan, Denise Kum and Haruhiko Sameshima, Fong was part of a small group of Aotearoa Asian artists who came to prominence during the 1990s.

Fong’s work has been characterised as simultaneously representing the micro- and macrocosm through contrasting elements of light/dark or translucent/solid. Organic forms and human traces (fingerprints, dribbles, smears) often appear in her work with surface textures showing the trace of physical processes. In earlier work, the female body, albeit in an abstracted, psychological form, was a frequent subject. Holes, circles and ellipses are still a recurring motif, and she has cited Judy Chicago’s use of ‘central core’ (vaginal) imagery as an influence.

Fong has held major solo exhibitions, including More Human (1995) presenting work resulting from the artist residency she was awarded at Govett-Brewster Gallery, and Universe (1999) at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (now Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū). She has described the starting point for her work as “generally intuitive responses to the world, to my state of mind, and to cultural aspects around me.”

Fong’s work in Elemental (2004) at Starkwhite Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau, made use of domestic objects such as ladders, drawers and beads, in contrast with her earlier more abstracted symbolism. Entry to the exhibition was through a completely red, tunnel-like passage, which Fong described in Art News, Winter 2004, as “a metaphor for the dualistic or binary code we have in life - from the outside to the interior''.

In recent paintings, alongside recurring abstract forms (holes, radiating or drop-like shapes), motifs from the natural world are layered on the surface. Laser cut elements such as fronds and snippets of symmetrical grille-like patterning can be seen in works such as Nova 8 (2016–2020) and Nexus X (2019). Fong’s series of paintings in the group exhibition A Place to Call Home (2023) at Bergman Gallery, present a black background layered with strokes of gold and silver leaf revealed through circular holes in a translucent, blue surface.

In 1994 Fong was the artist-in-residence at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne and the joint winner (with Bill Hammond) of the Visa Gold Art Award. In 1995 she was artist-in-residence at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and was the Visiting Artist at the University of Canterbury in 1999. Moving to Melbourne in 1995, Fong returned to Tāmaki Makaurau in 2001 when she was appointed as lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts. She remained there until 2005. She was a recipient of the Parehuia McCahon House Artists’ Residency in 2008. She is currently represented by Bergman Gallery.