For her upcoming show in Hong Kong, New York-based artist Dominique Fung turns to the unlikely figure of Empress Dowager Cixi to investigate how a woman’s image is shaped by perception, legacy and historical bias. Mariella Radaelli reports.

Dominique Fung, a second-generation Chinese Canadian artist with Hong Kong and Shanghai ancestry, excavates female history through oneiric storytelling. The role of women in society is central to her practice, and her first Hong Kong solo show, Beneath the Golden Canopy, centers around the figure of Empress Dowager Cixi, who was the most powerful figure in China from 1861 to 1908. Cixi’s aura can be traced in Fung’s dreamlike compositions — especially in her depictions of imperial robes and extravagant banquets.

The exhibition at the Massimo De Carlo gallery features oil paintings on both canvas and old Chinese lacquer jewelry boxes.

“I’m drawn to historical objects because they carry meaning beyond their aesthetic beauty,” says the artist about the early 20th-century boxes she has used to paint on. “They are witnesses to time, shaped by the people who made, owned, and passed them down. I’m fascinated by how objects, like stories, are never static — they shift, accumulate layers, and become vessels for different narratives.”

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She hastens to clarify that she is not too keen on a romantic notion of nostalgia. “It’s more about engaging with the past in a way that feels alive, personal, and open.”

“I like to create spaces that feel familiar but are not entirely real, the ones that exist between memory and fiction,” Fung says. “I pull from still life, figuration, and abstraction because I don’t want to be confined to one visual language.”

A woman in a man’s world

One of the highlight pieces in the show is an attempt to capture the intricate power dynamics at work in the imperial harem when Cixi controlled the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In it, the Xianfeng Emperor is depicted as the “limping dragon”. His wife, Empress Consort Ci’an — who was made co-regent together with Cixi after the emperor’s death in 1861 but was for all practical purposes prevailed upon by the latter, who ruled in the name of her infant son, the Tongzhi Emperor — is the “fragile phoenix”. And Cixi, an erstwhile concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor who maneuvered her way to the apex, is portrayed as the “she-dragon”, towering over the phoenix-bodied Ci’an.

Interestingly, there is a shift from two-tone to multicolor in the painting, representing the difference in ethos during the reigns of the Xianfeng Emperor and Cixi. The tonal shift is Fung’s homage to the traditional Chinese scroll — a format invented for storytelling through a series of images.  

Fung’s interest in Cixi is shaped both by her heritage and her reading of Chinese history. “Empress Dowager Cixi is a fascinating figure because she represents a contradiction — she wielded immense power in a world that sought to diminish women’s authority,” says the artist. “Cixi has been mythologized, demonized, and distorted, often seen through a Western colonial lens. I’m interested in how narratives around powerful women are constructed, particularly how they’re framed as either manipulators or tragic figures. Cixi, in many ways, embodies this tension. Her story allows me to explore femininity and how women’s roles are shaped by perception, legacy, and historical bias.”

Fung aims not to reconstruct Cixi’s world but to engage with its interpretations, omissions, and myths. Neither would she like to tell viewers what to take away from the show. She sees her artworks as open-ended, capable of carrying “multiple, sometimes conflicting, narratives”.  

Fung was born in Ottawa and now lives in New York City. She is particularly pleased to bring Beneath the Golden Canopy to Hong Kong — a layered site of shifting histories and identities. “The show reflects on how history is never truly fixed because it is constantly rewritten, reframed and debated. These themes resonate in Hong Kong, where East and West, tradition and modernity, are always in dialogue. I wanted my first exhibition here to reflect that complexity.”

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The Hong Kong show is also a homecoming for Fung, who has roots in the city. “Hong Kong was always a distant yet familiar presence growing up,” she says. “I think a lot about this sense of inherited memory — about how places can shape us even when we are physically removed from them.”

If you go

Beneath the Golden Canopy

by Dominique Fung

Dates: March 24 to May 16

Venue: Massimo De Carlo Galle

No 10 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

https://massimodecarlo.com/it/galleries/hong-kong