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One is not born a woman

21 December 2023 - 27 January 2024

Free

EVENT DESCRIPTION

In Feminist scholar Monique Wittig’s seminal text “One is not born a woman” (1981), she departs from a materialist feminist reading of masculinity and femininity. The title of the text—and this exhibition—takes from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. For Wittig, the theoretical possibility of a lesbian society (notedly, she does not advocate for a matriarchy) reveals the artifice of the category of “woman.” In initiating an analysis of the production of the category of woman, as one would do with understandings of master/slave, coloniser/colonised, bourgeois/proletariat, the idea of woman no longer becomes a natural category, but an ideological one.To find one’s place in the symbolic order is to get initiated into the rituals and signs that make up society. This exhibition seeks to think about Wittig’s text today and to revisit a fundamental question: How does one go from being a girl to a woman? What might it mean to read against the grain of the Bildungsroman?

Considering the lines drawn by institutions both formal and informal between portrayals of the female figure in pornographic shops to the nude in classical painting, Anabelle Lau’s paintings are carefully scaled recreations of HotMilk Magazine, an explicit Japanese adult magazine. Lau’s paintings immerse the viewer in a world rich with female sexual desire. Her work exaggerates the size of the comic images, thus emphasizing the female-oriented erotic expression and redefining and challenging the daily notions of femininity and womanhood. Hou Lam Tsui’s Rabu Rabu (2023), commissioned for the Times Museum in Guangzhou for the exhibition “Follow the Feeling,” emulates a constantly glitching dating sim. In her new work, Tsui considers the glitch as a palpable starting point to unravel the ontology of queerness and love through commodities. She manipulates the conventions and visual elements of “gal games,” a genre of Japanese video games centered around interactions with young female characters.

Based in Pasig City, Philippines, Tekla Tamoria’s tapestries, installations, and wearables possess the unmistakable spirit of the resourceful Tagalog vernacular: hand-me-down and foraged materials sewn and glued together in patches and layers to create a new whole from dispersed scraps. Referencing an iconic riddle from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Speak Friend (2023) is an inviting wall hanging that directly addresses the viewer with the applique text: “Speak Friend and Enter.” Created to be placed at the entrance of her solo exhibition at Vinyl on Vinyl gallery in Metro Manila, Tamoria wanted the piece to proclaim that “you are going to enter a vulnerable space.”

IV Chan’s works explore matrilineal relationships and how they shape personhood. Merging hard plastic toys with supple stuffing and delicate fabrics, her soft sculptures and installations reflect on how children’s toys become substitutes for the mother when she is not present. This physical relationship between a child and their toy is most heightened in toys that require greater bodily contact to use, such as the animal-shaped four-wheeled scooters ubiquitous in Hong Kong.

Details

Start:
21 December 2023
End:
27 January 2024
Admission:
Free
Event Category:
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