Renee So’s faces don’t often have all their features. Some have noses, but her early busts and knitted paintings often have mouths grown over by facial (or head) hair. Many wear masks, covering almost every detail which would give a hint of their character. “But they always have eyes,” she says.
Like these characters, So’s body of work itself emphasises the eyes – or, at least, the visual. It metabolises an enormous swathe of visible data, drawn largely from museum collections in London, where she has lived since 2005. So’s project is sometimes described as “bringing to light” the stories held within the objects she observes, or else offering a critical perspective on the dominating histories told by the institutions that display them. These are histories of extraction and exploitation in which those institutions frequently continue to participate. However, when observed closely, So’s practice feels both more playful and powerful – than this picture sets out. “I didn’t know any artists growing up,” So says. This growing up took place on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung land in Melbourne’s Ascot Vale, where her family had settled down since moving to Australia from Hong Kong in 1975. She had taken art classes as a teenager at an otherwise “very academic” school and went to RMIT to study a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in painting. “In the nineties,” she says, “a lot of people in painting departments weren’t really ‘painting.’ Everyone was doing expanded practice. People felt that everything was possible.” So took this “everything” more to heart than most.
