“It’s almost like you could dive into them,” the artist Faye Wei Wei says of her paintings over the phone from London. “I like to swim a lot in the lido and I often think about how, when you’re swimming, the pool is like this mirrored surface. As your fingertips are reaching for another stroke, you see a reflection of yourself and there’s this doubling. It’s almost like there’s another world that you could exist in and you could just go into it.”
This romantic way of looking at such a simple action, is a throughline within her work. Once she even painted two intertwining flowers on a literal portal—a lover’s door—to protect him and remind him of their love. “It’s a bit silly, but there’s a record of the traces, all the marks and the feeling that you fit into the painting,” Wei Wei says of the outpouring of self. “You can feel my presence there. I see canvas and the surface of a painting as infinite.”
Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than within her debut monograph Portals, out now from Éditions Lutanie, which encompasses nearly 14 years of the British artist’s work. The book opens with a simple dedication to Wei Wei’s mother, Autumn Cloud, in Chinese, and a figure drawing titled, I Tangled Your Legs in Mine. We Were a Knot in the Grain of the World. “The first piece is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, but it’s just me and my ex-girlfriend intertwined,” she explains. “It’s a really tender drawing and I made it by rubbing it out with a pencil eraser. It created this kind of dreamlike quality, but also a cocooning of the two lovers.”
Born in South London, Wei Wei spent the majority of her childhood either seated at the table drawing while her siblings played video games or picking flowers—“lots of good weeds,” she says—at the park down the street. She remembers collecting fallen leaves with her art class when she was about six and developing an early interest in still lifes. “I was so fascinated by the crevices in leaves,” she says. “It just felt really natural. I don’t know why it just feels so good—like all the blood is rushing into my right hand—but I’m really moved by it.”