Wuon-Gean Ho’s Dream Lunch looks at personal depictions of food and consider how these have changed in recent months of solitude. Wuon-Gean will also reflect on how printmaking has some parallels with cooking, in the gathering of ingredients with a goal in mind, and how the viewing of the end-product has parallels with the consumption of sweet treats. Her fellowship at The Royal Academy Schools in 2016 started this culinary contemplation. There was a chef whose daily feasts soothed and fattened us up. Being of Chinese heritage, food is an important means of communication, sharing and celebration. Her Singaporean and Malaysian family are shown in many works. During this recent enforced solitude, she started to make numerous prints of comfort-eating and drinking alone. “Dream Lunch” describes an imagined menu of grilled mackerel, stuffed with onions and crushed peppercorns and cardamom, with steamed rice, and raspberries and icecream for afters. The print contains an explicit desire to share a specific meal with friends and family.
Wuon-Gean Ho was born in Oxford, and graduated with a BA in History of Art from Cambridge University, before taking up a Japanese Government Scholarship in 1998 to study woodblock printmaking in Japan. She later studied MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art, graduating with a distinction in 2016, and then was a printmaking fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in London.
Currently she is a PhD student at the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR), University of West of England, Bristol, UK, researching the conveyance of touch in printmaking through time-based media. She is also the inaugural editor of the IMPACT Printmaking Journal, an academic peer-reviewed journal published by the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of West England. She can be found on Instagram under the handle @wuongean
Be sure to check out Covid Tales a series of prints made by Wuon-Gean Ho as a diary during lockdown in 2020.
World Wide Wontons 