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If ever there was a true romantic, it would be Faye Wei Wei.
“I often make little books for people that I love,” says the artist, calling in from a studio overflowing with vintage torches, bucketfuls of postcards and a black birdcage on the mantelpiece behind her. She picks up objects, pushing them close to the camera to show off a small detail or spinning the screen around to reveal an explosion of paint pots and photos on the floor.
“For my best friend Diana, I got this beautiful gold, antique box with a rose on it. I put lots of little objects inside and made her an egg shaped poetry book with a solid gold rose necklace and some dandelion seeds. It was really beautiful.”
For some, stories like this may sound a tad mawkish. But for Faye, romantic art is simply an extension of her life. Her large-scale paintings portray gauzy dreamscapes of friends, lovers and the natural world that fascinates her. Often rendered in pastel colours with painterly brushstrokes, they’re childlike and fantastical – a deeply unironic devotion to magic and vulnerability.
Born in Tooting, South London, to Hong Kongese parents, Faye studied Fine Art at London’s Slade School before exhibiting at Situations gallery in New York and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna.
After a holiday spent sketching portrait-ready friends in Athens, she’s back to work with Cob Gallery’s release Portals, a new book containing 280 pages of her paintings and drawings.
“I often paint my friends and people I love,” she says. “They always look like themselves, but there’s also something [of myself] in all the portraits, too, so it’s [like] an interchange of souls within the painting. It’s quite a loving act, painting someone you care about.”
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