When a curator mounting an exhibition about our skin mentions Didier Anzieu's『The Skin Ego』, Steven Conner's『The Book of Skin』, Franz Fanon's『Black Skin White Mask』, the list of references clearly indicates that his or her exhibition does not treat the skin just as a physical part of the body. The exhibition Ultra Skin is a philosophical, socio-cultural and anthropological exploration of the skin.
Among what fascinated me in this exhibition first are the works of Korean artist Jaehong Kim who presents the body as landscape. When viewed from a long distance, his realist paintings appear to depict desolate mountainous areas, but a closer look at them reveals that these are human bodies scarred and scratched by canon balls or barbed-wire entanglements. The body is his father-in-law whose life went through Japanese colonialism, the Korean War and the ideological divide between South and North Koreas. Kim carved the historical agony and tragedy of Korean people and their land as wounds onto the bodyscape.
Another artist who draws on the body as his canvas is Chinese artist Ni Haifeng living and working in Amsterdam. In his photographic works, his own body is painted and embellished with motifs of blooms and tendrils typical of Chinese porcelain, and with a sailing ship and pages from a voyage journal of the East India Company. Hinting at the fact that china exported to Europe through the Company's colonial trades became a vogue in the-18th-century Europe as 'exotic' and 'oriental' artefacts, Haifeng identifies himself with Chinese porcelain in relation to cultural identity and displacement in the 21st century.
Together with the two artists shown in the section of 'site of social meanings', the works of eighteen artists are divided into seven sections, namely, 'skin and self', 'site of social meanings', 'surface and shell', 'communication medium', 'microscopic views', and 'skin colour - difference and discrimination'. They all call attention to the skin's tactility and transformability, seeing it as a social medium through which we make bodily contact with the world creating and mediating social relations and on which the notions of beauty, gender and ethnicity are invoked and inscribed. The artists tackle a variety of skin-related matters in various materials, taking the skin as their artistic medium effective in turning what are thought to be alien issues into more intimate ones.
The skin has capacity and complexity due to its simultaneous relationship to our body and the world. The skin's location at the threshold between the exterior and interior of the body often produces the metaphor of surface. However, in the works of the artists in this exhibition, its inbetweenness is not simply an envelope or covering of the body demarcating it from the world, but is a physical terrain itself. It is a contested zone between reality and our perception, bringing to the body a sense of identity and territory defined and negotiated in the world. Furthermore the intensely porous experience of the world through the skin leads to a cornucopia of the ways of viewing and mapping the world in both cerebral and visceral terms.
The venue of this exhibition is a museum of a cosmetics company that is supposed to promote the romanticised skin under the banner of such taglines as "The skin is where a lady's power comes". For a corporate museum to throw food for thought to society through an art exhibition like Ultra Skin can be complimented as one of the ways to make good its social responsibilities. A final note, though, should address the exhibition title, which seems to me not to fully deliver its theme. An adjective seems missing between 'ultra' and 'skin'. Might the omission have been purposeful on the curator's part? Perhaps not. Still, it would be interesting to try coming up with a candidate word on your own: 'versatile', 'subjective', 'abstruse' or anything else?
No comments:
Post a Comment