Doris Wong Wai-yin has had so many visitors to her Fo Tan studio in recent weeks that she’s unsure who we are, and what our business is, when we arrive. After making sure we’re not serial killers, she lets us into the cosy space she shares with Otto Li Tin-lun and her boyfriend, Kwan Sheung-chi, both fellow Chinese University fine arts graduates. She turns off a small television set and we walk around stacks and stacks of canvasses, some completed and others still blank, and sit next to the kitchen to chat.

“I usually avoid that question,” she says, when asked why she makes art. “If I think about it too much, it seems like there’s no reason for it.” She laughs. “It’s been really natural. Since I entered the program at Chinese University, I’ve had a lot of opportunities.” After she finished her BFA, she did an MA in fine art at Leeds University, on a British Chevening Postgraduate Scholarship. In 2008, she showed work in ten separate exhibitions.

Despite her rising star, she still has to contend with being treated as a girlfriend rather than an artist. Last year during the exhibition Inside Looking Out at Osage Beijing, she was introduced a number of times as Kwan’s girlfriend. “It was as if I was an object, like a flowerpot,” she says, laughing. In response, she made a video, Tribute to <Inside Looking Out> – For the male artists along my way. In the video, she appears to be hitting each of the six artists – all friends from university, including Tozer Pak Sheung-chuen and Lee Kit – in the head with a stool. “It’s the only time I’ve made art from a feminist perspective,” she says. Ironically, Tribute is her most violent work.

The artists:
Tozer Pak Sheung-chuen
Lee Kit
Doris Wong
Leung Chi-wo
Adrian Wong
Nadim Abbas
Tsang Kin-wah