Eileen Feng’s practice unfolds at the intersection of material discipline, historical consciousness, and perceptual inquiry. Painting operates not as a vehicle for mastery, but as a method of thinking—one that moves between intuition and structure, illusion and physical presence. Drawing from objects encountered in daily life, global histories embedded in material culture, and the shifting conditions of contemporary image-making, the work reflects a sustained attention to how meaning accumulates through looking. In a time shaped by accelerated visual production and technological mediation, painting remains a space for stillness, ambiguity, and sustained inquiry.

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How do you reconcile the tension between raw, innate creativity and the discipline required to master your craft?

I don’t necessarily see tension between the two sides; they go along side by side. The will to create a work first has to overcome the inertia prior to its existence, and it is the learned discipline that holds my practice together, the ability to see structure and paths of inquiry amidst scattered ideas. And of course, discipline within the arts is not a rigid construct; to me, it refers more to the acquired skill set instead of rules. I’m not sure whether there is truly such a thing as mastery over my craft; perhaps it's the accumulation of knowledge, yet there is always room for more. My confidence in the medium is limited, and I try to think through the image and work with what it needs. I try to let the work teach me.

When I first started painting, there were moments of frustration when my skills failed to convey the concept behind the imagery. Small things like painting a shadow, knowing color palettes required a bodily knowledge of the materials, which does not allow for shortcuts. The exception is trial and error, which is why painting as a medium still captivates me, there’s always an element of problem solving.

Does spirituality or a connection to something larger than yourself influence your creative process?

I’m always drawn to subjects embedded in history. There is a general tendency to maintain dialogue with the material reality of things. For a while, I was fascinated by the aesthetic influence the Dutch East India Company and the Silk Road trade had on Chinese porcelain patterns.

Take the blue and white painted vases, for example, what course of passage brought a style originated in Islamic tradition into a Dutch still-life painting? Beaver skin hunted in Northern Canada was brought across oceans to dominate Parisian fashion. Such objects document the story of globalization ahead of its time.There is an element of personal narrative within globalization as well. Growing up in a cross-cultural environment, objects and people are in constant motion throughout daily life; the foreign parts are internalized, and I find myself situated in that flow of globalization, surrounded by objects from other parts of the world.

I try to keep those thoughts in mind when approaching my work, being a part of the historical narrative as well as material culture. The things we produce and purchase speak to our desires and tell the society we live in, and artworks are always desiring objects. Of course with history there is always an element of fiction, and painting for me is a way of creating realities out of illusions. 

How do you reignite creativity during those inevitable periods of self-doubt or stagnation?

I try to maintain the daily routine as much as possible by being in the studio and keeping my mind active. Anxiety during stagnation is inevitable, although sometimes productive. I get through periods of productive anxiety and the crippling kind; it is rather cyclical. The approach I find useful to avoid burnout is to constantly remind myself that painting is not an isolated practice. The medium naturally imposes its own constraints, and there are multiple ways to explore ideas in image-making that may be more cohesive.

Inspiration comes in many forms. My relationship with literature and writing has proven to be invaluable over the years, the distance to shift into a different flow of time, reading texts by artists that resonate with my own practice. I’d clear my head by staying out of the studio for a week, watching films, and some reading, then come back with a fresh start. Most importantly, having peers and fellow artists who share similar struggles and give mutual support.

Do you feel a personal connection to your subject matter is essential? How has this connection shaped your work?

Most of the things I have painted are things I’ve encountered in real life, objects that carry sentimental value. They are things which I wish to document and understand out of curiosity. I often rely on that initial curiosity as a point of entry; choosing what to paint is the hardest part.

The role I assigned myself is similar to that of a director, finding the right frame, angle, and lighting to guide the audience to a specific point of focus. Though this process painting becomes a mode of inquiry, a mode of thinking based on my understanding of the subject matter, I’m able to get closer to the objects during the process. A recent series I was working on started with painting tokens from the Monopoly board game. I was drawn to the nature of games and how we learn social codes by play-acting since childhood. The houses and bills used in board games become very real in that sense.

In Monopoly, players can take different strategies; there is an element of play in my studio as well, taking risks and maximizing outcomes.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly infiltrating creative fields. Do you see artificial intelligence as a threat, a tool, or a collaborator in the art world?

I see artificial intelligence as a tool with unexpected repercussions. We live in an unprecedented time during which our relationship with image-making is going through rapid changes. Image generators like Mid-Journey and Stable Diffusion offer a mode of seeing in which vision is processed as data sets; the line between image and information has been transgressed and needs to be redefined. It is hard to say whether a generated image can be called an artwork in the conventional sense; it is more like a heat map where each pixel is calculated with precision to give the anticipated result. Image making has always been an artificial practice; now there is a growing self-awareness of its cultural function and circulation beyond aesthetic experience.

Artists and theorists like Hito Steyerl and Peter Szendy, who have been closely following the development of image generators, often draw attention to the abundance of imagery online. There is an ever-ending stream of images being uploaded and downloaded every second. Many of my peers have felt visual fatigue; every image starts to look the same, and the question of authenticity comes up again. 

As a painter living under such an environment, I operate like a search engine, trying to find a space amidst increasingly homogenized aesthetic trends. There is an increasing urgency I have felt to make works that reflect our time, incorporate technology, or at least address new developments.

The greatest threat, in my view, would be that the chaos and serendipity of creation will be rationalized into an algorithm. Maybe it's a nostalgic attitude, but I still think the material nature of artwork cannot be simulated on screen.

In what ways has viewer feedback surprised you or shifted your perspective on your own work? 

The most surprising feedback I have received came from a college professor whose name I will not disclose here. Our class was doing daily studio visits at the time. That day he stepped into my cubical and we were chatting over some works in progress I had on the wall, then he noticed I had a painting leaning in the corner, he studied it for a while and said to me, you know if what I find the coolest thing you can do with a painting is that if you turn the canvas around it will go away. I stared at the back of that canvas, thought it was a rather enigmatic statement.

What occurred to me was that I was in fact making objects, objects which only shows one side to its audience, it is the surface of an image. Afterward I felt comfortable with making illusions, that painting due to its inherent materiality is both a truth and a lie, some kind of supreme fiction. That causal commit somehow made me more aware of the medium I was working with, especially how image and painting are two separate categories. The physical presence of artwork is very demanding, it requires a body in a room to be seen. 

Is art created for the artist, the audience, or somewhere in between?

In my view,  ambiguity between the two, where the work has the freedom to exist for itself, would be the ideal form. It is a structure similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy; once the work comes into existence, it conjures up its creation independent of the hands that made it. My sole criterion would be whether a painting can capture attention, create a space that draws its audience closer, and step into the picture to share a moment with it. One of my favorite artists, Luc Tuymans, once said in an interview that painting is a belated medium, like all thoughts; the conclusion always comes after the fact. In relation to time, which is of a different scale, the work does not move when the audience looks away.

Perhaps this stillness is all the more invaluable in our time, and I find it reassuring when revisiting museums and see the works greeting me like an old friend. I always make sure to go pay respects to Robert Gober’s hairy cheese, Catherine Murphy’s Blue Blanket, and Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Studio) when I’m at the Met. They have not aged somehow. The artist is always both the artist and the viewer. Although there are infinite ways to relate to a work, the artwork conceals its past and offers a continual presence.

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Across discipline and doubt, material resistance and conceptual curiosity, the work insists on painting as a living process rather than a resolved statement. Objects become points of entry into broader systems—of trade, play, globalization, and illusion—while the painted surface holds both truth and fiction at once. In resisting immediacy and spectacle, the practice affirms the value of slowness, physical presence, and attention. What remains is not an answer, but an encounter: a space where images ask to be entered, lingered with, and returned to—again and again.