Faye Wei Wei Finds Musicality in Paint

Faye Wei Wei’s ethereal figurative paintings made a splash as early as 2016, when she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Especially on Instagram, her self-image and romantic visions—full of motifs of hearts, lovers, flowers, bows, and rosaries—introduced a sort of fantasy painter unburdened by fear of external judgment.

Ready for a change after notable shows at Situations in New York and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna, Wei Wei enrolled last year in the MFA program at Yale. During a recent visit to her studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the floor was covered with book pages and image references, along with a pair of halved baseballs with fluffy guts, a clay model of an imagined city, a doll’s bed, and other found objects and sources of inspiration. “They are not necessarily any messes or obstacles—they are there for me to walk through,” she said of the disarray that doubled as a portal for improvisation and transformation.

In one of her recent paintings, Calcium Stars (severed romanesque ears), from 2024, streams of confetti exude from three floating ears above a figure reclining mischievously, undressed and in an ambiguous state between ecstasy and dread. The ears are loose studies of Romanesque sculptures that, in Wei Wei’s poetic imagination, serve as an invitation for whispered secrets. “I love architectural creatures, forms that exist as spaces rather than just objects,” she said, adding that the ears also reference a scene in Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000). “There’s this idea [in the movie] of digging a hole in a tree and whispering secrets into it. I love the motif of hidden messages through storytelling.”

A Telescope Made of Champagne Glass (2024) features a resting figure surrounded by miniature architectural forms made to look like lace floating against a vibrant orange plane. “I was experimenting with texture in this piece, using a sponge,” Wei Wei said. “I think of paint almost like a substance with its own value, like music. It carries deep emotion.”

Expressive brushwork filled with musical energy—lively staccato notes, flowing legato melodies—sweep across many of her paintings. “In music, you have structure, like a sequence or a movement, and I think painting can mirror that,” she said. In A Theatre on the Moon (2024), long, fluid strokes cloud the bell of a trumpet that turns into a sort of tempest, as if excavating the interior space of the instrument while activating its sonic charge on the canvas.

Looking at Wei Wei’s work, one can feel both bewildered and beholden. It envelops you at once in the viewpoint of a performer on an instrument as well as that of an audience member peering at the same performance on stage. In that way, her style evokes a multiverse where painterly gestures, like music, play on emotions that can range from stoic to melodramatic, whimsical to melancholic, and slightly antiquated to refreshingly modern.