Dominique Fung’s paintings contain something profoundly ancient yet unmistakably contemporary. Ancestral images and symbologies surface across her canvases, suspended in a fluid, dreamlike dimension where time and space dissolve into one another. For her debut show in Hong Kong with MASSIMODECARLO, the Brooklyn-based artist continues her excavation of imaginary worlds, channeled through her Hong Kong and Shanghai ancestry. Hers is a singular blend of traditional symbolism, historical references and magical atmospheres—a world that compensates for longing and loss with bewildering imagination.
Crucially, “Beneath the Golden Canopy” marks her first exhibition in her family’s hometown and her first visit back in more than eight years. “I was trying to come back in 2020 to celebrate my grandma’s 90th birthday,” she told Observer. Then the pandemic hit—coinciding with the precise moment her career began to accelerate. Today, Fung’s paintings command six figures at auction and her recent shows have sold out at a rapid clip. Last year she was tapped for a prestigious commission at Rockefeller Center, where she produced an epic circle of paintings that delved into ancient narratives and myths.
When we met for a walkthrough of the MASSIMODECARLO show, Fung had just come from a large family reunion lunch with her grandmother, her parents, her seven aunties and their families. With that context, the exhibition reads as both intimate and expansive—an attempt to reconnect with a powerful matriarchal legacy and the energies that orbit it. “My grandmother had seven daughters,” Fung said. “She’s the matriarch of a family of strong women.”
Fung was born in Ottawa to Chinese and Hong Kongese parents. Growing up in Canada, she was never exposed to large-scale, monumental painting; museum collections there leaned toward smaller formats—classical portraits, expansive landscapes and notably, Indigenous sculptures and drawings, which became some of her earliest points of reference. It wasn’t until she traveled to New York and then, on her first trip to Italy, encountered mural painting in person that she began reimagining the scale of her own practice. That was the moment she turned toward more ambitious formats and began drawing from sculptures and the Chinese collections at the Met, which became integral to her visual language.
Continuing her exploration of family heritage, Fung’s latest body of work draws on the fraught legacy of Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled the Qing empire from 1861 until her death in 1908. In Western narratives, Cixi has often been cast as ruthless and manipulative, while her role remains hotly contested in China. Yet her presence endures—woven through palaces, monuments and historical memory. “She’s the only female emperor, and also, she is always very controversial because everyone sees her as very manipulative,” Fung explained.
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In Fung’s hands, history and fantasy, fact and fiction melt together in a dreamlike fugue. Her paintings conjure an eclectic cast of concubines, empresses and emperors, arranged in dynamic compositions that abandon linear perspective in favor of the spatial logic of traditional Chinese scrolls—formats that allow for an endlessly unfolding pictorial field. Images surface slowly from the oil paint, summoned by both intention and intuition. As foreground and background collapse into each other, the dialectic of layering and excavation animates each canvas, producing densely symbolic spaces where disparate narratives coexist and accumulate meaning below the surface.
The paintings in the first room of MASSIMODECARLO’s Hong Kong gallery carry an unmistakable epic charge, evoking the gravitas of historical frescos. They unearth and reconfigure historical narratives in a rhythm of open-ended development, guided less by chronology than by sensation. At the same time, a subtle but insistent horizontal tension animates the compositions—divided between the dual forces of feminine and masculine. Warmer tones press against deep greens, suggesting that the symbolic figures surfacing from the past exist in a liminal, liquid space where time and space collapse. Fung’s intent is to materialize “this idea of embodying dual life, as dual personality or dual like living”—a universal condition of perpetual in-betweenness.
On the left, a dragon dissolves into a green backdrop, signifying the fragility and decline of imperial masculine power. Opposite it, a phoenix radiates with glowing energy. The dragon teeters precariously on one leg. As Fung recounts, when Cixi came to power she replaced all the dragons—longstanding emblems of authority in the imperial palaces—with phoenixes, relocating them to ponds and fountains and stripping them of their orbs, condemning them to instability. Fung hadn’t known this story while painting the figure; she discovered it later, during a visit to the Forbidden City. Somehow in yielding to the images emerging from the molten surface of her canvas, the artist unwittingly echoed and reactivated Cixi’s symbolic decisions.
In this context, Cixi becomes more than a historical figure—she’s a point of departure for investigating the nexus of power, femininity and seduction, and how women’s desires and presences have long been overlooked, exoticized or confined to the margins of history. Exhibiting these works in Hong Kong gave Fung a rare freedom: the ability to invoke Asian symbologies without their being similarly exoticized. “Here, these symbols are just in your daily life; you see them all the time,” she said. “When this imagery is shown in the West, these motifs are generally seen as a little bit more oriental.”
The paintings are carefully staged and dramatically lit, with a recurring candle motif guiding the viewer through the narrative. “I’m lighting the artwork to guide the audience through it,” Fung acknowledged. “They’re indicators; I just want the viewer to dance and enter into and exit using light.” Having studied illustration and once aspiring to work in animation, Fung reveals herself here as a natural storyteller, crafting images that invite theatrical engagement. She sees the painting as a kind of stage. “When I’m conceiving the preliminary painting, I’m thinking about the actors, the light and how the objects move through the space. But then, when actually the acting begins, and the songs begin, that’s when I play with the painting.” While her process begins with a mental framework, she avoids detailed preparatory drawings—preferring instead to move instinctively, letting figures emerge organically from the shifting tides of imagination.
Though her work ventures into the figurative, often in surrealistic fashion, Fung resists making the narrative too explicit. She withholds full facial portrayals of her characters, preferring to grasp a feeling of presence rather than describing it for the audience. “Faces tend to lock the viewer to a single reading,” she said, echoing something we recently discussed with artist Cecily Brown. The aim is to preserve ambiguity—to let the narrative remain open and the viewer linger in wonder as the painting reveals itself slowly, by degrees. “I want to make the viewer work a little bit.”
The second space is more intimate and domestic, as the artist envisioned it as Cixi’s own room. Scattered across the floor are antique wooden boxes housing small paintings—each one isolating and sheltering fragile gestures and precious emotional movements from external interference. Functioning as both memory cases and visual relics, the boxes were sourced by Fung through antiques and auctions. “I like the idea of collaborating with something that is already embedding a story,” she said. “It’s a way for me to collaborate with time. I want to join that conversation somehow.”
On the walls, a series of lush, floating banquettes conjure the indulgent rituals of the seducing empress. Suspended above and held aloft by anonymous laborers, they are already beginning to collapse under their own weight—precarious constructions of power, teetering like a house of cards.
Throughout the show, Fung attempts to excavate and uproot stories and histories linked to feelings of longing and belonging as they relate to her ancestral past. Resurfacing spontaneously from the liquid, almost plasmatic surface of her canvases, her paintings turn into portals that connect with ancestral memories and archetypal symbologies to confront universal gender dynamics repeating over time. In the attempt to investigate familial trauma rooted in the past, Fung’s dreamy works demonstrate how the free reemergence of both individual and collective imagination can facilitate profound discoveries and healing.
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