An excerpt from Anne-Laure Lemaitre’s conversation with Lily Wong, published in the exhibition catalogue.

So would you then say the format basically ended up influencing the way narrative showed up into your work for this specific series?

Yes definitely. I really love paper. I’ve been pretty committed (and maybe stubborn about) working with paper almost exclusively. I think there’s a natural gravitation towards paper partially because I have a background in printmaking and consider myself a drawer first and foremost, but also because many of the images I grew up surrounded by and looking at are paper-based. Even though I pull from a very wide range of inspiration, my paintings are always most intimately in conversation with a history of works on paper.

There’s two different formats of painting that I wanted my work in the show to mimic: handscroll paintings and hanging scroll paintings. Handscrolls are meant to be unfurled and read in sections, allowing for this almost cinematic continuous depiction of narrative. Though my paintings are much larger than a handscroll, they mimic the way that multiple timelines and environments get collapsed into a single surface: past and present are in continuous dialogue with each other.

In both ‘Echo’ and ‘An Exchange’ the paintings are structured so that the narrative can be entered or accessed from either end. There’s no defined starting point and there is also an implication that the narrative extends beyond the frame of the work.

And I do believe one of the things that is really obvious in your work is this absolute impossibility to take it all in. There’s always something left out of the picture. There’s frames within frames, pieces missing. Your paintings are crops of broader situations, embracing our inability to ever fully grasp the entirety of life, of ourselves, of our situation.

Yes, something is always missing. There’s a deep frustration that I feel about that but I know I won’t ever have the full picture. I know the end goal isn’t resolution, it’s just to keep moving.