Visit with Fay Ku
Fay Ku welcomes us inside her studio and gives us a behind-the-scenes look at her process and materials.
Drawing on her Chinese and Taiwanese upbringing, Fay's work blends mythic temporality with contemporary concerns, using unconventional drawing methods and materials to explore how one image, and one moment, can live many lives.
Growing up, I experienced my Chinese/Taiwanese culture as a predominantly oral one: through food, stories told by my parents, and language. I feel an affinity to mythologies, which tend to be episodic, with events often echoing the past, and time feeling multi-layered as opposed to linear. An oral society has a different concept of time compared to a literate one. I feel that my work, though steeped in contemporary concerns (my concerns), always feel mythic or fairy-tale-like.
Fay Ku
I love the Tang dynasty horse paintings, especially Han Gan. In "Unicorn", I was thinking of more recent, modern histories, the tumultous Cultural Revolution. I have a non-Western feel for time, where past and present can exist simultaneously. I think the mandarin langauge aids in this sort of relationship to time, since grammatical tense does not exist. Only the continuous present.
Fay Ku
An immersive printmaking residency program expanded my practice, so sometimes I incorporate printmaking techniques (and printmaking thinking), which has led me to make multiple drawings and works of a similar image - a way for one drawing to live multiple lives.
Fay Ku
