Lily Wong

Lily Wong

Lily Wong is a figurative painter whose layered narratives invoke a sense of curiosity and yearning around the conditions that inscribe and complicate memory. Her stories are never linear but rather elusive and open-ended, constantly ricocheting between a multitude of experiences and perspectives. Often stemming from moments of private and shared cultural fragmentation, Wong’s universe weaves together elements of fantasy and drama as her subjects move through dreamlike spaces and disoriented time. Her glowing color emerges as its own character, a pulse in the circulatory system of the painting, and sets up the paintings as portals into journeys full of searching and longing. They probe at the way that literal and metaphoric fracturings influences the development of personal myth and the body’s relationship to loss, intimacy, and desire.

Lily Wong (b. 1989 Seattle, USA) earned a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, RI in 2011 and completed an MFA at Hunter College, NY in 2020. She has been exhibited at Lyles & King, New York, NY; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; Semiose, Paris, FR; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; Galerie LJ, Paris, FR; Kapp Kapp, New York, NY and Philadelphia, PA; Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY; and Half Gallery, New York, NY; among others. Her work can be found in the collections of the RISD Museum, RI; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, FL; and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, ME. Wong lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.