Faye Wei Wei’s Dreamy Paintings Draw From Romantic Poems and “Rottenness”

Earlier this year, the artist Faye Wei Wei donned a cap and gown and graduated from Yale’s School of Art, the prestigious MFA program. “Even when I was at the Slade [School of Fine Art in London, where she received her BA in 2016], you heard chatter about the Yale MFA. I missed that kind of rigor and discourse,” Wei Wei tells W, speaking over Zoom from her Chinatown apartment in New York City. “I got to a place in my painting where I felt I wasn’t growing. I wanted to be really immersed in painting, to just incubate and work on the work, rather than working on shows.”

Despite—or perhaps because of—her protests about exhibiting, Wei Wei, who was born in 1994 in Tooting in South London, has two new solo shows comprised mostly of work produced during the MFA: Draw on Your Head and Sleep the Long Way Home. recently went on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (through March 7, 2027), while The wan stars danced between. will open at Herald St gallery’s Bologna site on September 18, running until November 21, 2026.

While these new titles demonstrate explicitly Wei Wei’s preoccupation with poetry—the monikers borrow, respectively, from the Hart Crane poem Voyages V, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge—the choreography of language has been informing her work for years; Yale simply facilitated the relationship, allowing the artist to structure her program around English literature, creative writing, and poetic theory classes. “I realized there was a tension I was searching for in poetry as well as in painting, where it couldn’t just be beautiful,” she says. “It had to have a kind of rottenness to it, or something discordant to the lyrical manner or beauty of the way paint glows.”

“Working on something over and over and erasing things and trying again, changes and informs your own language with painting,” she adds, noting too, that she began carrying a small notebook to record words she found “beautiful and rotten and almost ugly, which taught me a lot about constructing a painting as well. Then having fellow painters surrounding you, it made our joint cause of painting feel like a noble thing, that beauty was somehow important, like a balm against the tension of the world.”

Wei Wei’s paintings, which have been exhibited globally and which formed the backdrop to an augmented-reality playground that announced Simone Rocha’s H&M collection in 2021—Laila and Nadia Gohar could be seen having a picnic among its life-size flowers, while Paloma Elsesser was also pictured—are largely characterized by their delicate figures, and a keen but oftentimes knotted sense of femininity. Conceived in uneasy color palettes that can include chalky pinks, bruised purples, soft browns and baby blues, Wei Wei typically makes work with oil paints, as well as pencil, charcoal, and pastels, as per the seascapes that closed out her 2024 monograph, Portals.

At MoCa, the artist’s first solo institutional show in the U.S., there’s a discernible newness in the paintings, most notable in a bright-blue series that feels striking in a way older works didn’t. “It marks a transition into a new painting world that I’ve inhabited,” she says. “I’m really proud, and also feel emotional about it.” She’s reflecting on the show, but indirectly, she nods toward her recent move to New York. Her new studio, on the 10th floor of “a really old building” sits opposite her apartment and is already filling with the souvenirs and love tokens that have come to shape the mood she evokes with her painting. “I still feel timid to work there, even though it’s such a beautiful space. You can see all of the bridges from my window,” she adds. “There is a charm and a haunting to it. There’s a definite charge to the atmosphere.”

“I never really plan paintings,” she continues. “I'm someone who paints a lot from feeling and works with desire and pleasure.” In Italy, this approach extends to seascapes made during her recent Greek summer vacation post-grad, which will accompany paintings made in London and New York. “It’s a whole new body of work. The seascapes I really am in love with, and the paintings feel intimate,” says Wei Wei. “I named it after the Coleridge line because it fits with the way I've been using paint lately, with these star points and the spaces in between, feeling important to the structure of the painting. Then the Cleveland show is like the journey of life. What language does so beautifully, is arrive at the same outcome but through a more languid, beautiful way. It’s like the process of painting, which is labored and long.”