Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, New York City-based artist whose work is figurative, narrative and connects with past and present cultural histories. Her most paintings have been mix media on translucent sheets of Mylar where tableaux are built up through multiple drawings, juxtaposed and constructed through trial and error. She is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and participated in several artist residencies. She attended Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont for her B.A. and holds both a M.F.A. Studio Art and M.S. Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.
“As an immigrant, woman, and person of color, I have tackled otherness in my work for years. In my most recent work, difference is implied and it is the dominant culture’s iconography being reconstituted into quasi-religious tableaux to resemble classical Western paintings in form but with unfamiliar content.
Looking at art historical tropes as well as found images from social media, I have been drawing and painting these disparate elements on Mylar, sometimes layering the translucent sheets. My process echoes my memories of cultural assimilation: as a young child I fused the stories told by my Chinese/Taiwanese parents to the Western images surrounding me in order to create a comprehensive (albeit idiosyncratic) worldview. This process also refers to our brave new world of streaming images divorced from context, and the impulse to carve meaning.”
Fay Ku
