Caroline Wong: Girls Who Devour

About

Girls Who Devour brings together three interconnected bodies of work by London-based British-Malaysian-Chinese artist Caroline Wong – Cats and Girls, Hungry Women, and Picnics and Parties. Across pastel drawings and mixed-media paintings, Wong explores femininity, appetite, desire, and excess through scenes of convivial consumption and intimate female gathering.

The exhibition positions voracity as a feminist method. Wong’s women feast, drink, spill, and linger within feverish, highly saturated, sensorial environments, transforming acts of eating into gestures of female agency and pleasure. Appetite emerges as an aesthetic modality through which women reclaim bodily autonomy and resist historical expectations of restraint and delicacy, reversing their longstanding positioning as consumable objects.

Oscillating between exuberance and unease, these scenes evoke the complexities of desire and self-knowledge. Pleasure borders on loss of control, and indulgence becomes both liberating and vulnerable. Throughout the exhibition, Wong’s tactile mark-making mirrors the immediacy of eating and touching, producing images that are both visually striking and sensorially evocative. 

Adapted from text by Sophie Guo, curator and art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art.