[Colour photograph, silk, paperboard, a freeze frame from The Red Detachment of Women, the film of
its Peking opera version in 1972].
This work was produced during my exploration about how the gender policy being conducted in China in my mother’s youth, who was born in 1955, imposed its influence on me. I referred to the model opera which was very popular at the time, The Red Detachment of Women, and produced several visual art works.
The below is a writing by me relating to this work at the time:
In this work, I chose the moment of the heroine declaring her fervent self-devotion to the party and projected a freeze-frame of it on a blurry surface made of strings of silk. Silk is a material relating to my mother and is associated with a significant part of her life from a teenager to a young woman before my birth when she worked in a silk factory from 1972 to 1982. It also bears a personal and intimate connection with my mother, who used to make silk summer dresses for herself and for me. My mother is very fond of silk for its elegance and smoothness. Sometimes, she would ask me to share her appreciation of her collection of silk. To me, it is one of her expressions of her sexuality connected to the pursuit of feminine beauty. Though this image belonged to a past more than forty years ago, it is still able to evoke a sort of traumatic emotion in me because of its close association to the Cultural Revolution. I can sense its traces in my mother’s behaviour to me.
By covering this woman’s face and patriotic expression in the artwork, I intended to undermine this historical and cultural past and thus assuage my contrasting emotions: a combination of repellence and a sense of undeniable connection. Being partially absorbed into the depth of the surface, this blurred figure is about to be liberated from her designated roles, to be opened to new possibilities. The ‘blurring’, which mitigates the discomfort she caused me, puts her at the edge of being emptied of her individuality and being unrecognisable, except for her uniform, a gesture of both power and conformity. A structure is revealed here, a lasting oscillation between my inclination to disavow a traumatic fragment of the past, and my awareness of its irreducibility.
It has already been four years now. One thing I would like to mention is that, the experience of COVID-19 have changed my understanding about how I connect to that part of history, of which I am still digesting the impact.
