La Source
Wei Rong
韦蓉
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
130 x 80 cm
Notes
Wei Rong subverts the male gaze that underpins the western convention of painting the female nude. Her models are not the idealised goddesses of Renaissance paintings; instead they are ordinary women positioned in ordinary Chinese domestic interiors. Here her model adopts the pose of Ingres’ ‘La Source’ (1820-56) but she carries a plastic washing basin on her shoulder. Behind her, a duster pokes out of the neck of a non-precious blue-and-white glazed jar. There is no attempt to veil the mundane nature of everyday life in romance or mystery – Wei Rong inserts the reality of domestic labour into her painting suggesting that this has always been the lot of women. Her technique of projecting photographs onto her canvas to achieve extreme photo-realism, similarly, injects the contemporary everyday of the snapshot into the ‘high art’ realm of oil painting.
Accession number
2015.285