Female realities: Beauty has been concealed.
For this final project, I’ve decided to approach Obsession in a way to celebrate the beauty of female body. “Concealer” is a piece that redefines the form and freedom of a female body in relation to the public, as well as to empower the voice of female in the 21st century.
Gender has always been a topic where I am very interested in, growing up in a conservative city Hong Kong have shaped me to be a more expressive person, seeing people being close minded have motivated me to be more open up especially with human forms. My approach of this project is very simple, it is simply four shots of a female being topless, I want audience to enjoy and focus on the beauty rather than having too many actions inside the frame. I am a very sensitive person when it comes to body parts, our body is a work of art, every single person are born to be unique but yet we carry similar body features. However, in today’s society, we are still intolerant the fact of having female body parts being shown in public. Knowing that Signal is a projection project in a public space, I am extremely excited to challenge this idea with the public world. Unfortunately, my work needs to be removed due to nudity at the last minute.
The fact that nudity is still unacceptable in public is because the culture and social beliefs have been built there throughout the decades. As Lynda (1990) had said, “to suggest that pornography needs to be examined in relation to other forms of cultural production”. Cultural is something that can never get away with, no matter where you are; it is something that is heavily linked throughout the whole world. In terms of displaying a topless female body in public space, “any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize vulnerable points…The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual’s attitude to his own bodily and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural and social experience.” (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1966) (Nead, 2002) I do think the line of the boundary of what is acceptable and what not is determined by who we are and what we want to believe. My intention of this piece is not to draw discomfort, but to let audience to draw curiosity and be imaginative. One major founding from this project is that the “notion of unified form is integrally bound up with the perception of self, and the construction of individual identity”. (Nead, 2002) Our interpretation is often what forms the results.
“Art is imaginative, porn is pure fantasy” (Levinson, 2012)
The process of this project also takes a huge part of the message I am trying to deliver. During the production of this project, we caught a lot of attention from the public’s eyes. Although there weren’t a lot of people around during the shoot, it draws a lot of attention because there is a female being topless in a public space. The “transformation of the female body into the female nude is thus an act of regulation: of the female body and of the potentially wayward viewer whose wandering eye is disciplined by the conventions and protocols of art” (Nead, 2002) Once again, the attentions we get reinforces the idea of interpretation, because a lot of us socially believe that it is “wrong” to have a female topless in public, people cant get away with this erotic idea in their mind. The moment when I know my work cannot be projected, the first thing come to mind is that what was the clarification of what not to acceptable and what is, the fact that some of the shot didn’t even show any “private” parts needs to be taken down as well triggers my mind a bit. This moral concerns from the decision arise in this context of art, the blur line of this piece is unpredictable, and by the end, if this work is really shown to the public, what effect will it really bring to the society?
As for my audio of this piece, it focuses on human breathing sound; I looped the entire sound repeatedly to bring audience’s attention closer in knowing and understanding our body forms. Other than the appearance and aesthetic, the sounds that our body makes is something that we don’t always pay much attention to. The delivering of breathing sound let audiences to create and building up imaginations, their interpretation can sit between relaxations or the idea of sexually stimulating. It is a confusion mix of responses depending on what the viewer’s think it is.
The main aim of this project is to celebrate of being female in the 21st century, however it is sadly not expressed in the way it was intended to be. Our body in today’s world is detrimental to our society with pornography; it is something we cant get away with it due to social norms and cultural beliefs. The message that I am trying to deliver is not that fact that we don’t accept our body features, but it is the fact how we should view them in our own way.
References
Lynda, N. 1990 “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society” Vol.15 (2), pp.323-335, viewed 20 October 2015
Eaton, A. W. 2012 “What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?: A Feminist Perspective on Art and Pornography” Vol. 1 Chapter 14, viewed 28 October 2015
Nead, L. 2002 “The female nude: Art, obscenity and sexuality”, Routledge, viewed 30 October 2015
Levinson, Jerrold, Maes, Hans, 2012 “Art and Pornography : Philosophical Essays” Corby : OUP Oxford, viewed 20 October 2015