“It’s almost like you could dive into them,” the artist Faye Wei Wei says of her paintings over the phone from London. “I like to swim a lot in the lido and I often think about how, when you re swimming, the pool is like this mirrored surface. As your fingertips are reaching for another stroke, you see a reflection of yourself and there s this doubling. It s almost like there s another world that you could exist in and you could just go into it.”
This romantic way of looking at such a simple action, is a throughline within her work. Once she even painted two intertwining flowers on a literal portal—a lover’s door—to protect him and remind him of their love. “It’s a bit silly, but there’s a record of the traces, all the marks and the feeling that you fit into the painting,” Wei Wei says of the outpouring of self. “You can feel my presence there. I see canvas and the surface of a painting as infinite.”
Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than within her debut monograph Portals, out now from Éditions Lutanie, which encompasses nearly 14 years of the British artist’s work. The book opens with a simple dedication to Wei Wei’s mother, Autumn Cloud, in Chinese, and a figure drawing titled, I Tangled Your Legs in Mine. We Were a Knot in the Grain of the World. “The first piece is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, but it’s just me and my ex-girlfriend intertwined,” she explains. “It’s a really tender drawing and I made it by rubbing it out with a pencil eraser. It created this kind of dreamlike quality, but also a cocooning of the two lovers.”
Born in South London, Wei Wei spent the majority of her childhood either seated at the table drawing while her siblings played video games or picking flowers—“lots of good weeds,” she says—at the park down the street. She remembers collecting fallen leaves with her art class when she was about six and developing an early interest in still lifes. “I was so fascinated by the crevices in leaves,” she says. “It just felt really natural. I don’t know why it just feels so good—like all the blood is rushing into my right hand—but I’m really moved by it.”
In her teens, Wei Wei’s teachers encouraged her to start using oil paint rather than the easier to work with acrylic. “We’d use Liquin, which is quite toxic, goopy stuff. My teacher called it marmalade,” she said of the paint she still uses to this day. She has exhibited her work at London s Cob Gallery and Vienna s Galerie Kandlhofer, and has taken part in several major fashion collaborations with the designer Simone Rocha. “I love her sense of romanticism,” she says.
Lately, though, as she prepares to move to America in August, where she’ll pursue her MFA at Yale, Wei Wei finds herself returning to the park opposite her home. She’s been collecting “loads of dandelions” and has made a drawing out of their seeds. She returned from a recent holiday to find them drooping over the edge of their pewter vase. “They’re almost like suspended wishes,” Wei Wei suggests.
The theme of flowers runs deep throughout Portals, though not in the way you’d expect. There are still lifes, sure, including one striking image of a pink, red, and blue bouquet almost catching fire in the dark—“that kind of quiet nocturnal time where it’s just the flowers on their own, in love with each other,” she says. “Their petals feel like they’re blushing.” But flowers also punctuate intimate portraits of her close friends, surround images of wild horses and somehow accentuate the mythological air of knights, swords and crosses, and slithering, red snake tongues that pop out of lover’s mouths. Wei Wei isn’t attracted to flowers because of their beauty, necessarily, but “the way they ignite a painting without the need for a figure” and allow her to communicate despair through beauty.
“I like the tension between things,” she says, “whether it’s heavy and light, or the vibration between colors,” she says. This dichotomy is personified in portraits of the artist in a vintage slip dress, sitting in the beautiful mess that is her studio: a room strewn with works in progress, books open on the floor, smeared paint palettes and a collection of objects of rotating importance, like newly found sand dollars collected by the sea. Wei Wei starts most days reading poetry, then painting from a somewhat meditative state.
When Manon Lutanie, who edited the monograph and runs the Paris-based publishing house Éditions Lutanie, first met Wei Wei she was mesmerized by this way of working. “It’s a rare ability to draw so spontaneously, and she really has that. It’s so precious…you can see the coherence and evolution of her practice,” she said recently. The pair share a love of poetry, but despite her love of books and words, Wei Wei decided not to have any writing in the book, save for the titles of her artworks.
Calling back to the very first drawing, Portals closes with a series of chalk pastel seascapes painted on a recent trip to Greece. “They tie each other together, this fleeting love at the beginning and then this deep endless love of the ocean,” Wei Wei says. The very last painting is an abstract sunset over pink waves. She doesn’t like to admit to writing poetry, but her titles have resonance: She anchored her boat so we could waltz with the sunset, the sea was glass that day and all was still and silent and magical and love.
