Pratt in Venice faculty Fay Ku was recently interviewed in WAG Magazine in a feature titled “Playing the Hand She Was Dealt.”
In the interview, Ku speaks about her work, her identity as a Chinese-American artist, teaching, and playing poker.
Her work — shown recently in the Pelham Art Center’s “Domestic Brutes” show — is part of a trend among women artists to address the way women have been objectified in art by reimagining them in some of the world’s masterworks. It is a response to what British feminist film critic Laura Mulvey called the objectifying “male gaze.” For Ku, whose works echo Édouard Manet and Paul Gauguin, this idea of the female gaze is “a wonderful recent movement that draws attention to women, and it’s about time.” But it’s more than that.
“I can’t separate the female gaze from the East Asian gaze,” Ku says. “Everyone sees from their point of view, an internal viewpoint.”
Read the full interview here.
Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, New York City-based artist whose work is figurative, narrative and connects with past and present cultural histories. She is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art ( Honolulu, Hawaii); New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT); and Snite Museum of Art (South Bend, IN); she has also participated in several artist residencies including Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY); Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY); Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque, NV); and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE). She attended Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont for her B.A. and holds both a M.F.A. Studio Art and M.S. Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She is represented by H Gallery, Paris, France.
