Oftentimes, I feel like the Asian American experience is that people don’t see us as whole – a full person with complex stories.
Dominique Fung
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Dominique Fung reconfigures colonial-era visual tropes in this new limited edition print.
Handheld Fan exemplifies the artist’s distinctive blend of the uncanny and the symbolically charged. Based on her 2021 oil painting Bone Holding Fan, the work features four faces merging into a veiled Qing Dynasty bone hand fan. These fans, often intricately carved from bone or ivory and embellished with miniature paintings, calligraphy, or pierced latticework, were once luxury objects tied to courtly life and export markets.
Here, the fan emerges as a recurring motif, historically used in 18th and 19th-century European chinoiserie painting and early Hollywood cinema to exoticise and obscure Asian women. Whether delicately shielding a gaze or acting as an ornamental cypher, the fan operates as a stand-in for a racialised and gendered fantasy that Fung critically dismantles and reimagines through fragmentation and multiplicity.
Working in close collaboration with Fung, master printmakers at Make-Ready employed 13 layers of textured ink to create a raised outline around the fan, enhancing the tactile depth of the composition and echoing the artist’s engagement with material history and cultural memory.
Dominique Fung1 collaborationDominique Fung’s paintings unfold like theatrical vignettes, each staging a world where ancestral objects become charged with memory, metaphor and mystery. Infused with a sense of drama, the compositions are illuminated by deliberate, almost cinematic lighting: amber glows, ochre shadows and deep lacquer-like hues echo the texture of aged silk or firelit lacquer screens.
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