AGE: 30
BASED IN: New Haven
It’s hard to tell by looking at Faye Wei Wei’s intricately gestural, almost tangled paintings that they often spring from simple objects or images, like a seashell, a tortoiseshell pillbox, or a hyacinth garden in a T.S. Eliot poem. The artist surrounds herself with odds and ends that intuitively draw her in, and sooner or later, they surface in her work.
“It’s like absorbing all the things around me and then pushing them back out,” she says. “I like it to be a sort of ritualistic flowing of the paint, [where] you’re making these gestures and reacting to each one. It’s really difficult and disobedient how the paint reacts.”
She’s had this impulse for sublimation since childhood, when she began collecting acorns and covering them with gold leaf. After attending the Slade School of Fine Art, Wei Wei began exhibiting at galleries, including New York’s Situations and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna. Now 30, Wei Wei is preparing to spend the next 18 months drawing from very different surroundings. The London native recently moved to the U.S. to attend Yale’s MFA program. Living in the comparatively small town of New Haven has been a culture shock. “Being here feels like you’re in a simulation,” she says. “The only places to go are the studio or my dorm room, or there’s like one student bar.”
On the plus side, she’s been doing nothing but painting. For inspiration, she goes to the university’s famous Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where she pores over illuminated manuscripts, diagrams of trees, and 15th-century books about fireworks. But don’t expect to see the results of this research anytime soon. The artist is strictly “incubating” while in school, “and hopefully coming out with a body of work that’s really, really amazing.”
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