Banquets

Caroline Wong’s banquets are never-ending feasts, referencing the sticky gluttony of Breughel’s ‘Land of Cockaigne’, littered post-feast Italian floor mosaics, and mouth-watering Bonnardian table spreads. For Wong, food runs through her work like a buttercream through cake. Eating and creating are the same thing for the artist: sensory, hedonistic, immediate. This collection of paintings centres a group of female friends cocooned in the rosy world of consumption. Wrapped in delicious warm hues, these paintings are an intimate depiction of unguarded female friendship.

These women are enveloped in each other, actively nourishing each other’s bodies. Life’s anxieties are locked out of these indulgent spaces, where immediacy and connection are sacred, celebrated with lashings of wine, umami seafood dinners, and sugar-rushes of birthday cake.

The food and relationships spread across these canvases are beautiful to behold. The plump dumplings, dripping summer fruits, and delicious cosiness of these women make the viewer want to dive in and join the hubbub. These paintings were inspired by the easy friendship Wong had with a group of female friends in China and are delightfully nostalgic and sentimental.

Domesticity, sentimentality, and femininity have historically been approached with a derrogatory and often patronising lens. 19th century paintings of female friendship in Britain were labelled ‘gossip paintings’, coding female conversation as inconsequential and frivolous. In a more modern sense, there still lingers a feeling of disparagement against paintings which depict uncomplicated tenderness. The edgy and the political are considered more noble than the joyful and the heartfelt. The slovenly excesses of Wong’s women are indeed transgressive in the context of the many passive, well-behaved women in art, but this excess is enacted within a space of sweet sentimentality. Ultimately Wong's paintings unabashedly celebrate the generosity and beauty of female friendship. We see these women, larger than life in their warm, small worlds, feeding each other, encouraging each person to be bigger, louder, loving, and more themselves. 

Kate Reeve Edwards