The reason for my curatorial work comes from my undergraduate work Traces of Women, women in today’s society no longer just want to show their good and shiny side to everyone, we are willing to show our imperfections and the traces of our age without hiding them, we are not afraid to judge, or we don’t care about other people’s opinion at all, what is more important is to live our own self and be happy.

In the early stages of curating the exhibition, my idea was to continue the project from last semester’s open learning —— parcel. Initially it was to do with the social theme of female body image anxiety.

However, during the subsequent research study it became clear that although this is a social issue, I shifted direction as society progressed and the global value of self-identity for women increased.

• Work one, is from a fellow contemporary art practitioner —– YIXU LIU . I commodified women’s bodies, treating them as objects without ideology or sensation. The female’s limbs are placed on meat hooks, like pork for sale. I try to explore the minds of objectified women in this way.

One of the reasons why I chose to invite YIXU LIU artists to join me in this exhibition of female power is that in my first-hand research, I came to the conclusion that people instinctively feel the need to rate women, comment on their bodies and looks, or categorise and rank them with various labels. This is inherently impolite and unfair. The artist LIU uses an ironic and intuitive approach, placing the most direct body on the hook. The image is the most direct impact to the viewer, strongly satirising the objectification of women in society and calling for the inner pursuit of equality, but today in 2023 the word equality has become numb.

I think this work is a great introduction to my work 1, a very good prologue.

• Work 2, speaking of prologue, my second artist, Che chen Meng. She is an undergraduate student from Kingston.

As she shares the same theme as the third performance artist, JINGYI MAO, I have chosen to use her video as a prologue to my exhibition.

The artist chenchen and tells the story of a woman imprisoned in a Chinese village who has been kidnapped, raped and is now a mother of eight children, bound in chains.

The result is a reflection on how often we hear, as Chinese women, that you shouldn’t dress too revealing, it’s dangerous. You shouldn’t be too pretty, it’s dangerous. Don’t go out at night, it’s dangerous. In the workplace: to be an independent woman, you have to prove that you can do what men can do.

Living alone: it’s safer to pretend you don’t live alone by putting a pair of men’s shoes outside your door.

Women, you are already full of energy and don’t need to use men to embolden yourself.

And men, you don’t need to use your manhood to prove yourself either!

These are the reasons why I chose works two and three to include in my exhibition, briefly about the trafficked and abused women represented by the chained women, and reflecting on the squirming state of feminism as it has developed in China so far. The artist JINGYI MAO Jiang Chuan is wearing a self-made dress, a top with elements of chains printed on it. The giant long dragging chokehold of a fake penis unfolds at the ECA in Edinburgh for a day of walking through the ordinary.

• Han Zhang’s work is about her belief that marriage is the last form of slavery in human society. The essence of marriage is the denial of women and the control of reproductive rights. The essence of marriage is that men ensure that they all have slaves of their own. In the artist’s eyes the wedding becomes the scene of a murder in her eyes. In a way, it also expresses the lies that men have within themselves to women after the false ceremony has passed. It is a scene of a murder that is also a feast interrupted.

Mar 29, 2023