Michelle Fung Kuen Suet is a visual artist and art educator whose ambitious ongoing oeuvre revolves around a grand narrative of a dystopian world set in the year 2084. With bold and unfettered imagination, subtle humour, and delicate pathos, she weaves acute observations of the early twenty-first century into an absurd, fantastical landscape populated with plastic-eating humans, flying elephants, and islands floating in the sky, and frequently alludes to literary influences such as Orwell and Swift. Her works present a fictional geopolitical map of a bizarre future, one impacted by changes in the Anthropocene. Fung’s works span a broad range of media including text, books, drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, performances and short films, each chosen carefully for its inherent historical and experiential implications.
Her most recent exhibition, Polluta, Floating Artist Colony in the Sky (2018) at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, California, USA, was the non-profit gallery’s first show by a Hong Kong artist and one of the most successful in its forty-year history. Her award-winning book Tin Hong Gaau Jyu 天空膠雨 (Joint Publishing, 2017) tells a cautionary dystopian tale of a future where a frenzy of plastic consumption (i.e., lifesaver donuts, telephone hotdogs) has led humans past the point of no return. Her work Plastic, plastic, every where! received the Grotto Award, Hong Kong Baptist University (2015) and Award of Excellence, Fourth Greater China Illustration Awards (2016). Her exhibition I Don’t Know if You Know How Much I Love You (2012) was the inaugural solo show at Hi Art, a gallery owned by Beijing art tycoon Wu Jing. She has participated in prestigious artist residencies including Banff Centre, Canada; Island Institute, Alaska; and Art Omi, New York (recipient of the Cecily Brown Fellowship).