MS: Would you say that the silk thread that metaphorically runs throughout your practice and your use of silk screens connotes something greater?

RF: If you look at it and zoom out, silk has been historically significant throughout global migration and cultural exchange. You look at the Silk Road and how that influences so many cultures. It has this larger historical connotation where you can look at how this material started in one place but was then translated and ended up in Europe. That links to my interest in looking at collection-based objects because to find specific historical silk-based painting examples, you have to look into museum collections. But I am also trying to create works that are genuine to me. I don’t want to just try to start making these silk paintings that ‘look’ like they’re trying to emulate these historical works. It’s not just replicating but using the materials creatively.

MS: VAF(E) provided me with a one-line bio of your practice, and it must be difficult to condense your entire art-making process and intention into a single sentence. The bio states: “You expand the languages of painterly abstraction by examining its global histories.” How would you begin to unpack that statement? 

RF: I guess when considering different forms of communicating ideas, that’s why people choose art, like myself. To briefly unpack, it stems from my interest in painting and materiality, especially since uni. I’ve always been attracted to painting and different kinds of materiality to do with colour, tone, and texture, through a painterly lens. I say I am a painting artist, but I do other things as well, especially considering my practice includes a loose, gestural kind of mark-making, sculptural works, installation and ceramics. In education generally, a specific kind of history of painting is elaborated. It sounds cliche, but it obviously comes through a specific lineage or canon of art such as abstraction going back to Kandinsky, Modernism etc. I’m interested in how these Eurocentric histories intersect with my cultural heritage, which is Chinese. East Asian or Asian art practices often mirror ideas explored in Western modernist painting but are usually seen as secondary or adjacent to it. I’m not trying to critique this but rather shift focus to a different lens of looking at these forms of making. 

MS: This abstraction created through spatiality seems to be central to your practice. It makes me think of your work included in The Tea Exchange, which was a collaboration between The Chinese Garden of Friendship and MOCA which you recently took part in. You mentioned how it was not the tea itself, but the specific metal tea boxes that evoke the aroma and smell of tea, that transport you. Do your works act as a portal? Are they biographical in that sense?

RF: Yeah, I mean it is, but I don’t want it to be objectively seen as just my identity. It’s a representation, but every work is an extension of oneself. I’m open to interpretations. The biographical aspect is in the materials I use, not necessarily in painting a portrait of my ancestors. It’s an exploration of ideas related to my biography but in a broader context.

MS: Would you say then your practice is spontaneous, do you have a planned end product or rather, or do the materials lead the way?

RF: It’s a bit of all of the above. I have an idea of the type of work I want to make, whether it's going to be a stretched painting, like the ones you see in the Fellowship exhibit, or if it’s going to be some kind of looser, assemblage work. The works are strategic in the sense that my process is quite rooted in layering. I keep old paintings, materials and fabrics in an archive that I’m open to reusing in new works. To me, it seems structured but to others, it may appear spontaneous. That’s where this creativity comes in, like when you are trying to solve a puzzle and it doesn’t seem finished. The whole art-making experience is a journey like this for me.

MS: I feel the same with writing, you can start with a vague understanding of where it ends but it’s worthwhile being open to the creative process. 

RF: I feel like editing is where the magic of creativity happens. Because you know like anyone can make a good painting but it’s about trying to find the places to push and pull between, to challenge how it will be perceived in the end and maybe do something that isn’t obvious or is exciting. 

MS: Anyone can make a painting, but not anyone can have that depth of knowledge or research to back it like yourself. 

RF: That’s why it’s always funny when someone asks me how long it takes for me to make an artwork. I never know if they're asking about that in a physical sense or about the whole process from start to finish. I feel like it ends up taking a long time—it’s taken years in all honesty.