Participation has been a challenge for me this week to think about my own project.
Because on the web, it is harder to show how to think about form in both individual and collective projects and to increase interaction with the audience in order to draw them in, which I think is fundamentally different to an offline exhibition. My goal of engaging the audience must be around keeping them interested in the artwork I am curating and then reading more about the work and the artist to further my ideas, which I think would be very easy to achieve if it was just to achieve my personal goals, but if the whole collective project was to be achieved on the website (as the online exhibition of the collective project was assigned to me and Nuanxin Zhang), if not differentiated, then my individual project is in a sense a ‘subordinate’ to the collective project, and I don’t think I am obliged to design and produce all the online exhibition interactions for others.
So for now I’m moving forward with my own project, both in terms of continuing to contact artists and discussing with them some specific aspects of the main content of the exhibition. This week I’ve focused on talking to Xiaoshuo Luo about organising the content of her work, which I’ll be placing in the main part of my exhibition.
This is my interview details below:
Lisirui Good afternoon, Xiaoshuo. I have been very interested in your contemporary art practice ever since I saw it on social media platforms (insgram&RED), and I am glad to have a conversation with you today. I understand that not only did you grow up in China, but you are currently developing in the direction of public art under a famous professor Kyotaro Hakamata in Japan, and it can be said that your work represents the characteristics of a certain East Asian context for women artists. However, The topic of women seems to have been wrapped up in the East Asian context, hardly a topic that has become poignant.
So I am very interested How do you consider this phenomenon? And how do you present your views in your artworks?
Xiaoshuo
We may be aware that when women artists engage in public expression, especially when we try to address serious topics, they are more likely to be attacked or resisted, and this resistance is not only from a male perspective. What I feel in my work is that the prejudice against women has not been completely eliminated with the progress of society, and this inertia makes it difficult to shake the dominance of the “male” discourse in the traditional cultural context. For the female community, the so-called ‘self’ is in many cases wrapped and hidden in a shell of alienation by the other and the self. I hope that through my works and participatory expressions, more people will be able to look at or pay attention to the women’s group and see a little bit of the “real self” in the cracks of the wrapping.
Lisirui When did you turn the focus of your artistic practice toward female themes? Will this thread be central to your work in the future?
Xiaoshuo
Female issues are a social issue that has become a concern since graduating from university. How does women’s identity change in the family or in society, or even in different regions? Perhaps more often than not, the current issues facing women are discussed in the form of interviews and recordings. Artistic expression around women’s fertility, labour, emotions, etc. I will be presenting this work in the gallery through two years of monastic life, through paintings, video, three-dimensional works and performance artworks, which will also allow the viewer to actively participate in the discussion.
Lisirui I understand that your hometown is in Shandong, China, which is the origin of Confucianism in China and has produced many Confucian masters such as Confucius and Mencius. In later times, Confucianism gradually became more observant of the universal requirements of patriarchy and more demanding on women in terms of morality and life. On the Chinese internet, people are particularly vocal in their criticism of patriarchal attitudes in Shandong. And in your life experience, do you think that your experiences back home have inspired you to think about your work?
Xiaoshuo
I was born and grew up in such an atmosphere where, coincidentally, some men in Shandong had strong macho attitudes, and I remember most fondly that my grandmother gave me very little love and attention as a girl, and for that reason she didn’t like my mother either. As you may know, Confucius’ hometown is in Qufu, a small city in Shandong. Moving on the topic of Confucianism, it has gradually become more patriarchal, I think it may have something to do with Confucius’ philosophy, which was more focused on the value of women in the family, and the female stranglehold of patriarchy, which probably started with the Song dynasty’s guiding ideology, Cheng and Zhu. The patriarchal concept was developed in the course of the development of a centralised system, and I understand that this may have been the case in various regions, with many of the less developed regions in southern China possibly experiencing more severe confinement and suppression of women.
Through my work I hope to present an intimate space for women that can help and heal more women and allow young women to think further about the connection between their bodies and their identities. How women can be liberated from their social identity to reveal their unique values and charms.
Lisirui I was very impressed by the work Temperature. You have collected labels of all the clothes purchased in your mother’s wardrobe over a period of thirty years and organized them into what is called a sequential order specimen. This is not only a history of the consumer era, but also a dialogue between you and your mother as you step into time and space. So, why did you name this work ‘Temperature’? How do you think about the ‘passed’ and the ‘left behind’ in this work?
Xiaoshuo
The reason for focusing on Women’s issues is also because I live in a “traditional” family atmosphere in Shandong, which makes me feel more about the violation and oppression of the female role of the family towards the “mother”. In the space of the family, time, femininity and the value of labor may gradually fade away, leaving behind the suppressed consumerism of women in the family and the constraints brought by different roles, slowly losing the value of self in the labels and constraints. The value of self is slowly lost in labels and bondage.
Lisirui The Black Flower, a series of installations you created last year, struck me as a girl who grew up in an East Asian context and felt a great sense of powerlessness in the face of the sanitary napkin as a symbol of ‘menstrual shame’. You have made a huge flower installation out of the sanitary napkins that a girl needs throughout the year and wrapped it in black tape with the ‘ignorance’ of society’s indifference, which is a clever artistic double entendre. Menstruation, a symbol of fertility and the core of the constant productivity of human society, is oppressed by an implicitly patriarchal narrative of social indifference that feels absurd. This leads to the implication that the social and political dimensions of women’s suffering are so widespread and yet so easily overlooked. By depicting this form of objectification through visual language, are women artists entering into ‘womanhood’ and exploring their own relationship with suffering?Do you think that the loss of subjectivity of women in interpreting their pain is culturally specific?
Xiaoshuo
Thank you for your interpretation. This work is also an attempt to express the relationship between women and society from the point of view of the body’s feelings. I feel that there is a specific culture regarding the loss of subjectivity in women’s interpretation of their pain, and that different countries may choose different perspectives and methods of expression depending on their cultural habits, which is why they have a diverse art culture. For example, Japan tends to be more subtle and rigorous in expressing stress and pain on relatively acute social topics, and more logical in thinking but more abstract in expression.
Lisirui Let’s come back to the last artwork. I don’t know how to translate the tittle better, maybe it could be HANABI or Sparks or Fireworks ? English is not quite the same as our East Asian languages, their language is more direct and sometimes the meaning embedded in it can be difficult to interpret. What do you think about it?
Foot fetishism is something that I don’t think distinguishes between Eastern and Western cultures and it’s very hard to understand the underlying logic of the thing (laughs, as a woman I think it’s really hard to understand). And it’s also very old, culturally, in the West, dating back to the erotic poetry of the ancient Greek writer Philostratus. And according to an online study by the University of Bologna in 2006, the most common fetishes were for body parts or objects usually associated with body parts (33% and 30% respectively). Of those who liked body parts, the most were feet and toes, with 47% of respondents liking them. With such fetish trends comes the oppression of women and the “female buy-in”. On the Chinese internet, many awakened women refer to high heels as ‘beauty torture devices’, which I think is an apt description. In 2015, the president of the Cannes Film Festival apologized for women being denied access to the red carpet for not wearing high heels. In 2016, British receptionist Nicola Thorp was told to go home for wearing flats to work, prompting a 150,000-strong protest petition.
This series of your works, which are the most numerous, brutal, and bloody, make me feel your anger. Too many female artists still seem to be stuck stating facts and complaining when it comes to illustrating suffering, what do you think is the best way to mobilize feelings of anger and defiance? Unlike male narratives, the words and images used to describe male violence are often bold and aggressive, implying emotion and chaos, how do you think it would be more appropriate to show female anger?
Xiaoshuo
Yes, there may be some semantic bias in the cultural differences, and I think Fireworks is better.
I think it is limited or incomplete to show women’s anger and resistance through a painting. For two-dimensional visual art, the first requirement is to have artistry, including aesthetics and visual appeal to the public. Although public art is an interventional art, I would prefer to use a softer and more accurate way of expressing the artwork, as this would bring the reader closer to the work and reduce the cost of trying to read it. I would have liked the work to be more accurate in terms of artistic expression.
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