Artists: Agnes ARELLANO, Aki SASAMOTO, Amanda HENG, Arahmaiani, Araya RASDJARMREARNSOOK,Atsuko TANAKA, Bharti KHER, Brenda FAJARDO, CAO Fei, CHANG jia, CHOI Jae-eun, CHUNG Chanseung, JUNG Kangja, and KANG Kukjin, Eisa JOCSON. Fitriani Dwi KURNIASIH (Fitri DK), Fluxus, GUO Fengyi, HA Minsu, HE Chengyao, HONG LEE Hyunsook, I Gusti Ayu Kadek MURNIASIH, Imelda Cajipe Endaya, IPGIM, JANG Pa, JOO Myong-Duck, Joyce HO, JUNG Jungyeob, JUNG Kangja, KIM Insoon, KIM Nahee, Kiyoji OTSUJI, LEE Bul, LEE Eunsil, LEE Mire, LEE Soon-Jong, Mai ENDO × Aya MOMOSE, Mako IDEMITSU, Mariko MORI, Melati SURYODARMO, Mella JAARSMA, MIN Yong Soon, Al-An DESOUZA, Mitsuko TABE, Mrinalini MUKHERJEE, Nadiah BAMADHAJ, NAM Hwayeon, OH Kyung Hwa, Pacita ABAD, PARK Youngsook, Pinaree SANPITAK, RYU Jun Hwa, Shigeko KUBOTA, siren eun young jung × KIRARA, Tari ITO, Thảo Nguyên PHAN, Theresa Hak Kyung CHA, TONG Wenmin, WEN Hui, WU Mali, XIAO Lu, Yayoi KUSAMA, YEE I-Lann, YEOM Jihye, YIN Xiuzhen, Yoko ONO, YUN Suknam
Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists attempts a new examination of the contemporary meaning of post‒1960s art by Asian women from the perspective of ‘corporeality.’ It was developed as part of an Asian art project by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), which has carried out comparative research and exhibitions on Asian contemporary art beyond national borders. The body is a place where various ideologies and situations intersect, and it is also a locus that reveals difference and diversity. This exhibition assembles around 130 works by women artists from 11 Asian countries to explore this theme.
This exhibition consists of six sections: “Choreograph Life,” “Flexible Territories of Sexuality,” “Bodies·God(desse)s·Cosmology,” “Street Performances,” “Repeating Gestures‒Bodies·Objects·Language,” and “Bodies as Becoming‒Connecting Bodies.” Through them, it shares stories about diverse, polyphonous bodies that have redefined identity through various meanings. This aspect also relates to the exhibition’s aim of going beyond the perspective that views Asian women as ‘others’ vis-à-vis the Westerner or male and focusing on them instead as agents embodied in multilayered ways. At the same time, Connecting Bodies focuses on works that have questioned modernity while revealing the experiences of cultural otherness that have been applied to the body in the geographical and political space of Asia, as a setting where ideologies of nation-states, patriarchy, capitalism, and nationalism have been reproduced.
The exhibition also turns its attention to long-existing aspects of women’s culture, which has sought to understand thought/sensation and art/life in integrated ways. In this way, it attempts to discover artistic possibilities for encouraging ‘connections’ with those beyond us. At a historical moment when social sustainability is in doubt and a reappraisal of values is fundamentally needed, the feminist perspective‒transcending binary divisions of subject/object, culture/nature, and male/female‒can perhaps help us imagine an alternative world that embraces and connects a broader scope of being and identity.
Part 1. Choreograph Life
The body is a place where experiences of life are inscribed. Amid the emphasis on the experiencing subject since the 1960s, the body has been perceived anew as a locus for understanding and critiquing the world. The section entitled “Choreograph Life” spotlights work that expresses the life experiences and memories inscribed upon the body within a complex post‒1960s Asian history defined by phenomena of colonization, the Cold War and other warfare, migration, capitalism, and patriarchy. It also features work that questions the logic of modernity as it re-examines the meanings of sexuality, ethnicity, identity, class, and the state that are projected onto the body. Visitors will encounter work that explores the possibility for art to encourage connections centering on community life and solidarity in sisterhood.
(*Section two may contain content that is not suitable for audiences under the age of 19. Viewer discretion is advised.)
Part 2. Flexible Territories of Sexuality
“Flexible Territories of Sexuality” shares work by Asian women artists who question the social norms and cultural values surrounding sexuality as they focus on images and areas that are considered socially taboo, including representations of sex/death and pleasure/pain. It also includes works of performance, video, and photography that aspire to different possibilities beyond the fixed sexual binary division of ‘female’ and ‘male.’ Challenging existing patriarchal language and symbolic orders, these works revive the multiple corporeal experiences and tentacular perceptions of the female subjects marginalized within those systems. Rather than reducing femininity along essentialist lines, they expand it into flexible realms beyond existing concepts through acts of feminine writing (l’écriture feminine).
Part 3. Bodies·God(desse)s·Cosmology
“Bodies·God(desse)s·Cosmology” presents work that adopts images of gods (and goddesses) from different Asian countries’ folk mythology as themes and subjects of representation or that explores the body as a microcosm of the universe from a cosmological perspective. Goddess images challenge fixed gender roles and social norms in ways that re-examine colonial femininity, and they can also be read as symbols emphasizing social productivity and female creativity.
With images that blur distinctions of human/god, human/monster, normal/abnormal, or subject/object, these artists have attempted to view the organismal body and the workings of the universe in an integrated sense-in the process raising questions about modernity and systems of knowledge that center on categorization and discrimination.
Part 4. Street Performances
During the 1960s and 2000s, Asian cities were the settings of fast-paced processes of modernization. Amid these changes, cities were pervaded by contexts of postcolonialism, the Cold War, nationalism, industrialization, and neoliberalism, existing as spaces where norms, institutions, and hierarchies operated. Against this backdrop, Asian women artists staged performances on city streets and in everyday settings in their attempts to break down boundaries between art and life. They used their performances to represent the multilayered real-world contexts of urban spaces, including areas of gender, the environment, migration, and ethnicity.
Part 5. Repeating Gestures‒Bodies·Objects·Language
The fifth section focuses on repetition in performances. As a methodology for rendering everyday times, places, and actions strange and encouraging new perceptions of them. Repeated gestures with an emphasis on temporality and continuity offer means of representing collective memories and social oppression or of visualizing language loss, communication, migration, and identity amid the body’s relationship with power, language, and memory. In this fifth section, viewers encounter performance videos and photographic works that use repeated, ritualistic gestures to shed a new perspective on the institutions, objects, and environments associated with the body while infiltrating symbolic language.
Part 6. Bodies as Becoming‒Connecting Bodies
The sixth section, entitled “Bodies as Becoming‒Connecting Bodies,” presents works by Asian women artists who attempt to challenge hierarchies and binary distinctions: mind/body, human/nature, subject/object, human/non-human, male/female. Within binary systems of thought, non-Western women in Asia have been doubly excluded and marginalized as ‘others’ vis-à-vis white, Western males. New approaches to thinking that seek to overcome these forms of exclusion and inequality—as well as the binary mentality at the root of recent environmental issues—encourage the envisioning of the body at an artistic level as a ‘generator,’ constantly reconfiguring its identity and position as it forms horizontal relationships with the other bodies it connects to. Cyborgs transcend sex-based binary divisions and social realities, revealing ‘trans’ aspects of identity that do not conform to fixed definitions of country, gender, ethnicity, or class.
