Tactile: Neo-Feminism, New Autonomy
Multimedia Installation 'Tactile Body' & Red Thread Installation ‘Tactile Emotion’, 2024
Under China's long-standing patriarchal system, a social framework emerged that commodified Chinese women's identities, ideologies, and emotions, channeling them into symbols exchanged for material gains within family-centered structures. Today, however, Chinese women's art and liberated thoughts are increasingly infused with powerful autonomous desires in a broader social context. An increasing number of Chinese women are engaging in non-traditional, “cougar relationships” as a form of intimacy, through which they explore subjective psychological concepts, personal desires, romantic ideologies, and questions of social status and identity. Through videos documenting this relationship and the metaphor of red threads representing female autonomy, women are portrayed as independent individuals who reject the misplaced expectations imposed by male-dominated family and social norms. Instead of being confined to traditional roles as wives or mothers, they assert their rights and identities through these relationships, thereby redefining their place in society.
Multimedia Installation 'Tactile Body'
Extending from the conceptualization of the female gaze in ‘How Do I Look?’ as a way of articulating the value of the female subject, I have continued to use video imagery in this artwork, to explore the presentation of female autonomy and identity in cougar relationships. Cougar relationships represent a significant breakthrough for Chinese women, challenging long-standing emotional restrictions and repression. Women in such relationships are more likely to assert and maintain their own emotional desires. When traditional goals such as marriage and wifehood are no longer prioritized, intimate relationships become more diverse. In a supportive environment, this shift can contribute to greater stability in women's personal ideologies.
I use my own handheld video camera to incorporate the concept of the female gaze. I don't record female nudity or pornographic images but use the unique female gaze that subverts the status of men to focus on the expression of women's spiritual world and individuality. This transforms the gaze from the ‘Other’ to the examination of the self, allowing female subjective consciousness to fully explore and encompass the overall space. At the same time, by utilizing the power of visual communication in the form of video, I convey a more sensitive and delicate sense of female autonomy to the outside world. This encourages viewers to think more deeply about the concept of the female gaze by watching videos that depict the intimate relationship between the two genders.
The lack of a beginning and an end to each video in the compilation leaves the viewer uncertain about where the story is going. What is my female identity in the story? Am I a worker specializing in the field of art? A woman cared for in an intimate relationship? An authoritarian woman who speaks out? These conjectures about my subjective female identity can only be guessed through the technique of exploring my autonomous ideology with the female gaze in the perception video. This technique of oversharing emotional privacy in public is also part of the internet and video culture. Because my female identity is revealed by my subjective desires and pursuits, it cannot be defined by a patriarchal society or Other.
Red Thread Installation ‘Tactile Emotion’
Drawing on the ‘Legend of the Red Thread,’ an ancient Chinese tradition that continues to this day, in which an invisible red thread connects a child to its soulmate at birth, and in the years to come they grow closer and closer, finding each other after overcoming enormous social pressures, family trials, and distances. Chinese women also often use the dangling red thread to articulate their autonomous emotional needs, relying on the unique female gaze to examine themselves and become independent creators in pursuit of intimacy. This approach allows them to resist the patriarchal system that forces them to turn their subjective spiritual fantasies into subordinate objects of male and familial expectations through arranged blind dates without any choice.
Each individual red thread in the work represents a contemporary Chinese woman's desire for autonomy and intimacy, signaling the independence of each woman. Even though the installation is only made of red threads, it contains a variety of different female emotional fantasies, including my own non-traditional spiritual fantasies of the cougar relationship and my desire to be the dominant person in an intimate relationship. Each time a woman hangs her red thread, she explores the essence of the female gaze and rejects the erroneous emotional ideas that patriarchal society has ingrained in women for so long. It is no longer simply a matter of resisting the male gaze and manifesting the Other emotional desires, but rather a courageous reinvention of autonomous emotions, beginning with a focus on one's own experience and confronting one's self-trauma and true desires.
To make the work even more infectious, I invited the Chinese women I interviewed to hang the red threads on the installation. During they can keenly perceive their own self-worth and continue to search for themselves, incorporating the above emotions and many more types of autonomy into the artwork, and conveying to the viewer a stronger notion of women's emotional autonomy.
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