Pathology

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In Luise Fong’s paintings many things are held in tension. First, there is her use of the diptych format: two painted panels — often very different — which we are forced to view as one. Then there is the tension of materiality: Fong’s habit of piercing her panels to disrupt the illusion of solidity. Finally, there is the tension of size: Fong plays off the microcosm with the macrocosm, so that the viewer of her work could be looking through a microscope or a telescope, peering into the infinitesimal or the near infinite.

These tensions are evident in Pathology, a major early work by the artist. Here, the left-hand panel has a matt surface created through the repeated application and scraping back of paint, reminiscent of wood panelling — an impression encouraged by the circular knot-like hole. In contrast, seething cellular forms animate the right-hand panel, rising, converging and pushing apart across its surface.
Fong’s work draws a comparison between the skin of the body and the skin of the painted surface — both are at once tough and fragile, both vulnerable to damage. The work’s title refers to a field of science that seeks to understand injuries to the body’s cells and tissues, and the body’s means of responding to and repairing damage. In this context, the bullet-shaped hole in the left-hand panel becomes a wound, while the right-hand panel becomes a slide specimen, the body’s secrets revealed through artful staining. In her statement for the 1995 exhibition Cultural safety, in which Pathology was included, Fong quoted crime writer Patricia Cornwell’s description of a forensic investigation, where a luminescent spray reveals a constellation of blood droplets.

Fong’s background in textile design and printmaking is evident in her delicate manipulation of materials and concern with surface effect in her painting. Her working method is slow and meditative — she has said that much of her art has developed out of the intense experience of nearly drowning as a child. She recalls this as a pleasant sensation, a suspension of time and space that she regains when she is painting: ‘This feeling of falling, of letting go, is the closest I can get as an adult to my childhood memory.’1

Charlotte Huddleston

1 Luise Fong, artist’s statement, in Gregory Burke and Peter Weiermair (eds), Cultural safety: Contemporary art from New Zealand, exhibition catalogue, City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, and Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 1995, p. 45.

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Pathology is one of the most well-known of Fong’s paintings. It has been illustrated in three publications on New Zealand art and is representative of what many see as her signature style.

With a background in textile design and printmaking, Fong’s paintings have been noted for their ‘illustrious materiality’. She works with surface and material, creating abstract textures, which allude to micro-matter, water, fabric, and an un-described physicality. In 1994, she began to work with tensions offered by pairing together two different material surfaces.

Fong’s abstract surfaces are both sumptuous and beguiling. The pairing of opposites in her work at this time creates a false whole, which only further serves to conspire against definition. Pathology represents all of Fong’s interests in the subtlety and refinement of the surface, the paradox of a representation of a metaphysical void, and the balance of micro and macrocosms. In addition, this early work by Fong shows the influence she had over a number of New Zealand artists, in the mid to late 1990s, who were similarly preoccupied with this pursuit of divine materiality and process-driven painting.