When the High Line first approached her to commission an outdoor performance piece last August, Dominique Fung wasn’t sure she was the right person for the job. The 38-year-old artist had long been interested in theater and film, but staging a site-specific performance would be a departure from her typical practice, which had until then focused on painting and sculpture. She agreed to think about it.
“A Leaf’s Pilgrimage,” the lyrical odyssey through the life of a tea leaf that emerged from her decision, ran for three days in early September. The performance centered on the interplay between a guide who seems to be visiting from the ancient past and an assistant rooted in the present day. The pair led the audience through scenes that evoke how tea is grown and picked, allowed to wither on bamboo slats, and then packaged.
“I still feel like I’m a fledgling in terms of my art practice and career,” Fung says of the creative exercise. “I’m willing to try things out to see if they work or don’t work.”
The artist’s openness to trial-and-erroring her way through the opportunities that present themselves has brought her intricate and often wryly humorous work into vastly different art contexts. As part of the Art Production Fund’s Art in Focus commissions in 2023, she took over Rockefeller Center with the epic A Tale of Ancestral Memories, a 125-foot scroll-like mural, and a series of sculptural and painterly interventions around the Midtown site.
For the Armory Show last year, Fung built a whimsical wooden installation resembling a market stall, heaped with birdcages and draped with sculptural sausage links. In January, she’ll show new paintings in Massimo de Carlo’s thumbprint of a space in Paris, viewable 24/7 through its front window and a livestream online. The scale, medium, and backdrop vary, but Fung’s thematic blueprint—dusting off chapters of Chinese history, mythology, and the iconography that’s trickled down from each, then reimagining them with both wit and a critical eye—rarely does.
Fung’s parents, who had roots in Shanghai and Hong Kong, immigrated to Ottawa, Canada, where the artist was born in 1987. She got an applied arts degree from Sheridan College near Toronto before moving to Brooklyn in 2016. In New York, the nascent artist began to spend time in the East and South Asian collections of institutions like the Met. Moved by the design of these ancient objects, she acquired catalogs that now make up a studio reference library of sorts.
“Dominique is countering certain practices of Orientalism and exoticism,” Eugenie Tsai, the former senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, tells me, before adding that the artist has “an instinctual talent for suggesting stories—having something unfold in time.”
Fung had an idea for Shi: For a 2021 solo show with Jeffrey Deitch, she’d created patterned wallpaper depicting cranes. Upon close inspection, the birds were up to no good—drinking, mating, defecating. The two agreed the print’s cheeky humor was ideal for the walls of the bar’s bathroom. “It takes these themes of chinoiserie, that are almost stereotypically revered,” Shi says, “and it turns them on their head, injecting a sense of audacity.”
The High Line commission required a similar irreverence and improvisational approach. During one of the performances, a black storm cloud loomed overhead, and staffers distributed ponchos. In one scene, just as characters discuss how, ultimately, like the tea leaf, we “all must face the water,” raindrops began to fall. Fung worried that guests might leave early. Instead, she was delighted to hear someone muse that “it was actually really romantic.”
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