Dominique Fung

(Up)Rooted

★★☆☆☆

On until 20 December 2023

In Fung’s pastoral paintings and ceramics, the peaceful garden pond is the site of despair. Men weep into water lilies. The damned are locked in an underwater dance. Ghosts go fishing and fish are apex predators. 

All this tries to be macabre and surreal like in Bosch or Miyazaki but is instead laughably twee, not least because this isn’t the only show on in London set at the bottom of a Victorian garden. Fung may be on-trend and her East Asian influences elevate the canvases a little but the clumsy sculptures send the whole show back to the garden centre.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Shu Lea Cheang at Project Native Informant ★★☆☆☆

Shu Lea Cheang

Scifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023

★★☆☆☆

With material this gratuitously explicit and a curator this absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.

Mike Kelley, Ghost and Sprit at Tate Modern ★★★☆☆

Mike Kelley

Ghost and Spirit

★★★☆☆

The challenge of curating a retrospective of a career as rich as Kelley’s is to build a narrative that both lay audiences and art historians can believe. Wood packs the show and pleases neither fully.  It’s remarkable that any artist’s…

Avery Singer, Free Fall at Hauser & Wirth ★★☆☆☆

Avery Singer

Free Fall

★★☆☆☆

This show would be better without the baggage of the artist’s personal story and even better without the Twin Towers altogether.

Joanne Burke, Oes with works like Esses at Soft Opening ★★★★☆

Joanne Burke

Oes with works like Esses

★★★★☆

Hot metal is that, like water, it spills away from the mould.

Medusa at Union Gallery ★★★☆☆

Ada Bond, Rebecca Davy, Karen Densha, Sam Owen Hull, Hilary Jack, Rachel Goodyear, Evita Ziemele, et al.

Medusa

★★★☆☆

Interpreting a tale this grotesque, ugly, and venomous will take thousands of years

Josiane M.H. Pozi, Through My Fault at Carlos/Ishikawa ★★★☆☆

Josiane M.H. Pozi

Through My Fault

★★★☆☆

There’s a group, but they’re as indistinct as the faces of Jesus that regularly appear to people on slices of toast.

×