In this video we attend the opening of Lily Wong’s exhibition “Time, as a Symptom” at Lyles & King in New York. Lily Wong is an artist born in 1989 in Seattle, Washington. She earned a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and an MFA from Hunter College in 2020. Her work is part of collections at the RISD Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art. The exhibition at Lyles & King runs until October 4, 2025.
Lily Wong: Time, as a Symptom / Lyles & King, New York. Opening reception, September 3, 2025.
Press release:
Essay by Anthony Cudahy
“Precipice
Don’t lose your footing
The wall might be a floor”
I type this list into my Notes app while visiting Lily Wong’s studio. Her work plays with narrative tenses and outlines, embracing flexibility. A reliable narrator is absent. As we age, certainty in our fixed identity fades. How open can a story remain? In Moonflower, Wong grapples with these questions. The main figure is not merely mirrored but split into three. Scale is destabilized by a small (?) figure in the distance, holding the stem of a giant (?) flower, its bloom entering the room alongside the main figure. Her foot, entangled in another stem, steps forward without solid ground.
Lily’s studio is tidy. Large sheets of paper are pinned to the walls, meticulously layered with thin acrylic strokes over weeks and months. Brush wipes and color tests surround the works like Seurat frames. Her colors, now more complex than in earlier pieces, interconnect in surprising ways, reflecting across the paintings. References are plentiful: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s Suzaku Gate Moon woodprint, George Tooker’s quirky The Groping Hand, Bosch’s The Pedlar, and stills from a Patty Chang performance video. These potent images, taped to her studio walls for years or spread across her art book library, seep into her work, transforming it.
The Source, one of two paintings, not only references external artworks but examines the act of referencing. Before the reclining artist, waiting to be taped to the wall with blue artist tape, are prints of a Louise Bourgeois etching, one of Wong’s own works, and an artwork from the Met’s Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet exhibition. This last reference inspired Wong to paint a work within the painting, rendering her own gridded deities on the wall behind the artist.
Time, as a symptom takes its title from Joanna Newsom’s song, the final track on her 2015 album Divers. The album forms a closed loop, its last sound flowing into the first. Time dominates, existing beyond our spatial and dimensional understanding, shaped by the weight of joy and terror.
Svetlana Boym’s 2001 study, The Future of Nostalgia, defines two nostalgias, the latter being “reflective,” where Wong’s work resides. Boym writes: “Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately… Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.” Reflective nostalgics, Boym notes, “see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts.” Wong’s figures sometimes appear as self-portraits, other times as variants, splitting and haunting each other. Like the reflective nostalgic, Wong “desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time.” Poses recur; inside spaces feel cavernous, outside spaces constricted.
Cats and dogs occupy an ambivalent space: humans shape them, and they shape us, yet neither is fully domesticated. In Soliloquy, the artist arranges references—physical prints, drawings, and the glow of her iPhone—while crouched in an impossible pose (note the spatial distortion of her body against the floorboards). Her cat, Louis, perches on her back, guiding or grounding her. In Wayfarer, a dog nips at the figure’s leg, perhaps stopping her from leaving or entering, referencing Bosch’s pedlar and similar imagery. Ants, once devouring excess in Wong’s earlier works, return here, crawling at the pedlar’s staff. No longer tied to decay, they seem to urge her forward, despite the dog’s resistance. Other species’ sense of direction, incomprehensible to us, highlights our limited proprioception.
A braid symbolizes patience, weaving thousands of hair strands into a new form. Before the long, horizontal Time goes both ways, Wong described the scroll’s unique temporality, not meant to be seen all at once but explored in sections, rolled back and forth. Though the entire scene is visible, space and time remain inconsistent. Boym’s nostalgic imagery resonates: “A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.” Wong embraces this frame-breaking. Her spaces, too coherent for dreams, may be memory spaces, reconstructed and altered by the present.
Tooker’s The Groping Hand reaches for something illegible yet essential. In Soliloquy, the artist reaches across time and images, seeking transformation. Rain clings to the window in pearly drops, condensation longing for a deeper body of water. Iris Dement sings, “I think I’ll let the mystery be.” Kate Bush sings, “See those trees / Bend in the wind / I feel they’ve got a lot more sense than me / You see I try to resist… If I could learn to give like a rubberband / I’d be back on my feet.”
Lily Wong (b. 1989, Seattle, WA) earned a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2011) and an MFA from Hunter College (2020). Her work has been exhibited at Lyles & King, Various Small Fires, Semiose, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Green Family Art Foundation, Galerie LJ, Kapp Kapp, Fredericks & Freiser, and Half Gallery, among others. Her art is in the collections of the RISD Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
