Rising Stars: Meet Wowser Ng

Today we’d like to introduce you to Wowser Ng.

Hi Wowser, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My desire to be an artist came into being when I was an undergraduate. I was very rebellious and often disagreed with my teachers, which was also reflected in my art. After graduating from college, I went to work in the fashion and luxury industry. I have designed fashion illustrations for many fashion brands. In my work, I gradually found some unique visual symbols of my own. This may be influenced by my childhood experience.

When I was in middle school, my gender perception was confused, which was a lot of pressure for me at that time. A queer person in a gendered Asian society can be difficult to identify with. Therefore, it is difficult for me to become confident in the people around me, and I dare not express my own ideas. So, I became more and more withdrawn and didn’t like to talk to people around me. Later, because of the boarding school, my parents had no time to accompany me, but they would buy me many luxuries to meet my material needs. But I still feel very lonely, I will keep company with these luxuries every day, and often buy fashion magazines with my pocket money. I have a brochure of my own, and I draw pictures of products I like in magazines and study the stories of those products. I grew up with this lonely, self-fulfilling routine. Later, when I was studying for a master’s degree at the University of the Arts London, I started formal large-scale art creation. I put all these experiences into my pictures. In this way, many people found my works very special and fashionable, and I gradually became an artist.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
A lot of people think that I became famous at a young age and that I was lucky. But I had a lot of difficulties along the way. My parents didn’t want me to study art at first. They wanted to send me to Canada and the United States to study economics and finance as an undergraduate when I was in junior high school, but I was always bad at math. Later, when I entered the Academy of Fine Arts, I had a conflict of ideas with the people around me and the teachers. During that period, my works were not recognized. In such an environment, I would be more or less discriminated against, so I constantly deconstructed and reshaped my own world in such an environment full of pressure and depression to find some real self. Perhaps this experience made me gloomier and helped me understand what I wanted at an earlier age than my peers. When I was a student, my love experience was more difficult than those of my peers. Maybe it was because I met people badly, and the feeling of abandonment again and again gradually made me lose confidence. I often doubt myself and have a pessimistic attitude toward the things around me. Art can be said to be my salvation. I often forget the pain they bring to me in painting, sometimes sitting for a whole day is like a kind of anesthetic, paralyzing my despair for reality. Later, there are few men in my paintings, a large number of women, and exquisite and empty luxury goods, which may be my dissatisfaction with reality. The emptiness and loneliness are hidden under this superficial, sophisticated, fashionable surface.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m a visual artist, and I used to make fashion illustrations for some fashion brands, but then I transitioned to being a fine artist. In this experience of making fashion illustrations, I gradually found my own unique artistic language. My main medium is digital painting and I continue to study the possibilities of contemporary digital painting. My work operates by appropriating fashion products, these fluid, and gorgeous images depict Generation Z, an era of rapid material economic development, and attempt to highlight the dangers of continuing to support materialism. When I raise the issue of the relationship between goods and people, the audience needs to reflect on the influence of generation Z media on us and question the power of endorsements in the fashion/product industry. My paintings combine abstract and figurative, which is a challenge to pop art. I developed the painting practice of combining abstraction and pop, retained concrete goods in my pictures, explored topics such as consumerism and gender gaze through redesign and arrangement to form different contexts, and revealed pop culture under the influence of the current society with a visual narrative.

What does success mean to you?
Different people’s definitions and pursuits of success are different. Some people think that being famous and rich is a kind of success, while others think that being a famous artist is a kind of success. But I think success comes in stages, and there are small goals to be set at each stage. In every stage of artistic creation, we should constantly reflect on the shortcomings of our own works so as to improve them. In every self-denial to get progress and this progress to the recognition, that is a success.

Pricing:

• 1200USD (Crush, Limited Art Prints 1/5-Digital Painting, 50.00 × 62.00 × 4.00CM, 2022)
• 600USD (Gaze, Limited Art Prints 1/15-Digital Painting, 50.00 × 62.00 × 4.00CM, 2022)
• 800USD (Pray for rain, Limited Art Prints 1/10-Digital Painting, 52.00 × 70.00 × 4.00CM, 2021)
• 485USD (The vanishing saviour, Limited Art Prints 1/30-DIgital Painting, 52.00 × 70.00 × 4.00CM, 2021)
• 485USD (Prison Break, Limited Art Prints 1/30-Digital Painting, 52.00 × 70.00 × 4.00, 2022)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.wowserng.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wowser_ng/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074109674906
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wowser-ng-52805a234/
• Other: https://theartling.com/en/artist/wowser-ng/

Image Credits
Crush Gaze Blessings War Pray for rain The vanishing saviour Prison Break The Great Escape