Her Face

EVENT DESCRIPTION

In the contemporary order of existence, what can women become? “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex to “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” – Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, the discussion on reshaping womanhood finds expression in the works of Huang Jia (Julia) and Fan Zhen.

The exhibition “HER FACE” does not generate female narratives through specific female portraits or visual stories. Instead, Huang Jia uses minimalist lines and shapes to layer traces of life and threads of time on the canvas. Fan Zhen depicts the world through dots, shapes, and light, connecting her heart to the imagery. Through their works, they articulate the diverse representations of themselves and of women. Women are no longer different paradigms of “puppets”; countless women will generate endless female “appearances.”

Huang Jia’s work marks a turning point around 2004. Her early creations focused on depicting the physical and psychological characteristics of women, characterized by young, bald female figures. She explored the ambiguity of identity through a female gaze that contemplates both the self and the other. In her later works, she gradually shifted to the most basic lines, shapes, raised stitches, and monochromatic surfaces, using simple language to explore the rules of human visual perception and to express her abstract views alongside the expectations, attention, and memories of individual life.

Stitches have become Huang’s feature, which she derived from Enrico Castellani and the customs of a village in Southeast Asia. “When a relative passes away, the local people sew the image of the deceased using white cloth and thread as a memorial. This deeply moved me, so I adopted this idea of thread, but it is not actual sewing; instead, it is built up with paint and time.”

The repetitive application causes the “lines” and “shapes” to gradually protrude from the flat canvas, as if the fabric collaged on the surface and the stitching together creates a new composition. Huang virtualizes and deconstructs these elements, which are often seen as feminine, and by using the rules of human visual perception, she tells the audience that all forms are illusory.

Fan Zhen’s artistic creation is inextricably linked to her own experiences. She uses dots as the primary element in her works, influenced by Yayoi Kusama and by a dotted world that has always existed in her memory “The world I saw when I was a child was also dotted.”

The dotted surfaces create a unique sense of fading; during the creative process, the artwork is repeatedly exposed to sunlight, causing the colors on the canvas to blend and overlap continuously. Under the influence of time, this resembles the formation of countless cycles. This allows viewers to enter a meditative experience, as each dotted shape in the artwork is a unit that composes the world while also representing an independent small world within the three thousand realms, with countless points and endless variations.