Lily Wong

Pulling from the hyperbolic vernacular of cartooning and illustration, Lily Wong (b. 1989, Seattle, WA) engages with the digestibility of representational images and the way they can be subverted and redirected towards a pliable, psychological interiority. Elements of drama and fantasy are woven into improbable vignettes that offer a glimpse into a constantly fluctuating emotional landscape shaped by a sense of displacement, loss, curiosity, and yearning.  

Often engaged in acts of close looking and intimate contact, the figures in Wong’s work occupy narratives that invoke a sense of anxiety around the constructs that structure, inscribe, and erase bodies. Centered around a reimagination of personhood at the moment it becomes undone, the subjects probe at the way literal and metaphorical fracturing influences the body’s relationship to intimacy, desire, and structures of power.