Sunday, November 14, 2010
Asian Women’s Aesthetics in 21st Century Contexts
11/14/2010 01:34:00 AM | Posted by
suffer |
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I was co-curating for main exhibition of "International Incheon Women Artists' Bienniale" The exhibition was held on 1-30 august 2009 in Inchoen City, Seoul, Korea.
This is an article I wrote about the show. Hope it helpful for those who interested in female artists. English editor: Eva M. Pascal and Philip Jablon
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| The Adventures of the Women in Black, Hamra Abbas |
In a period where feminism has diverse points of view, the exhibition “So Close Yet So Far Away” aims to display contemporary visions of women through visual art embedded in contexts of age, nationality, race, religion, politics, social status and culture. This project focuses on women in specific cultural situations instead of creating a misleadingly universal conversation. Through the exhibition, I would like to illustrate the strategies and perspectives of today’s Asian women in works by significant female artists from Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Oceania, as well as Asians living in other continents. To give details about these, I categorize the artists into three broad topics, women’s voices, self expression, and reflections beyond gender.
Hearing women’s voices
Hamra Abbas, Pakistan-Kuwait-USA
At the entrance to the biennial, viewers confront a picture of masculine woman with oily black skin, strong eyes, and a weapon in her hand. It is a poster of an animated movie, “The Adventures of the Women in Black,” currently in production. Abbas creates new vision of the female super-hero who has a playful and madcap character as a 'public intervention' monument. Abbas, a Pakistani, celebrates Muslim women’s militancy within a culture of escalating male violence. Abbas was awarded the Jury prize at the 9th Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates this year. This award signals growing space for female expression, and even aggression, in Muslim countries.
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| Goddess of Flower, Sangeeta Sandrasegar |
Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Australia-Malaysia-India-England
Phoolan Devi, a famous Indian female bandit turned politician, inspires Goddess of Flower, a delicate wall paper-cut by Sangeeta Sandrasegar. She adapts this theme for the biennial with 25 pieces based on the size and shape of her body, an examination of the last five years of her life. She sees herself playing multiple roles as sister, daughter, partner, artist, and cross-cultural interloper. She uses her shifting perspectives to explore the complex identities of modern Asian women, interrogating her own subjectivities to understand those of others.
It is significant that Abbas and Sandrasegar, the South Asians, include similar images of struggling women in their works.
With 17,508 islands, 300 ethnic groups, and742 languages, Indonesia is one of the world’s most culturally diverse countries. However, minority ethnic groups are often discriminated against by the dominant domestic Javanese. Dutch-born Mella Jaarsma, who has lived in Indonesia since 1984, believes minorities in Indonesia need a public voice to ensure their survival. In this exhibition she presents her latest two works. The first is a video about a Papua woman who constructs her identity as an artist called “Michaella Jarawiri”. The work encourages Papua women to assert themselves and exposes government discrimination against ethnic minorities.
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| Zipper Zone, Mella Jaarsma |
To parody the skin-whitening trend among naturally tanned-skin women, Archana Hande shows a woman presenting a whitening cream in a wall paper with a video installation. Hande combines beauty parlor advertisements from Mumbai in “All is Fair in Which Magic White.” On one reading, the advertisements’ idealize, or surrender to, ideological colonization that asks natives to judge their bodies by alien standards of beauty. Alternatively, this phenomenon can be seen as a form of empowerment: modern women may choose to alter their “natural” ethnic appearance according to their own ideals.
Pinaree Sanpitak, Thailand
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| Breast Stupa Cookery, Pinaree Sanpitak |
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Nyctalopia, Fuyuko Matsui |
Fuyuko Matsui, Japan
There is female’s strength and power that restores her identity through art works by Fuyuko Matsui. She uses painful physical and physiological methods to display the inner strength, beauty and erotic power of the female form. The powdered mineral pigments on Silk work “Nyctalopia” (2005), show a women with pale skin and long black hair garroting a chicken. C.B. Liddell, a Tokyo-based writer, editor and cartoonist, describes the piece this way: “Matsui connects this to emotional numbness caused by pain or overexposure of the emotions, hence the poker-faced callousness of the woman’s action.” Matsui transforms an image of women’s oppression – at work in the kitchen – to one of frightening power. Her subjects invariably commit such outrageous and surprising acts.(more in the next post)
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