Performing Society: The Violence of Gender

Ma Qiusha disturbingly encapsulated the exhibition’s central idea of social strictures as a form of violence in her video From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili (2007). Here, the artist stands against a stark white background, gazing steadily into the camera as she delivers a monologue about her life growing up in China, her overbearing parents’ desire for a son, and their suffocating expectations of her success. Though initially undetectable, there is a razor on Ma’s tongue that cuts her as she speaks. At the very end, Ma removes the bloodied blade in a symbolic act of emancipation. Ma’s utilization of autobiography in this video engages with the feminist concept of “the personal is political,” revealing connections between her private pain and the pressures faced by Chinese society at large.

Housed in a small first-floor room, Julia Phillips’s three ceramic pieces and one relief-ink-on-paper work engaged with historical and racial contexts of gender violence. With titles like Intruder, Expanded, Positioner and Exoticizer, Phillips suggests an unwelcome and coercive presence, alluding to patriarchal as well as as colonial invasive acts. Exoticizer (Josephine Baker’s Belt) (2017), a gold-glazed ceramic belt that references the banana skirt worn by Black French showgirl Josephine Baker. Displayed on a metal pedestal, the work emphasizes the simultaneous othering and objectification of women of color.

Wong Ping’s typically colorful and bizarre animation Who’s the Daddy (2017) follows a male protagonist who reflects on patriarchy, heterosexual dating, and fatherhood. Acts of violence—such as the protagonist’s girlfriend gouging out his eye with her stiletto heel—are juxtaposed with moments of tenderness, as when the man embraces his role as a single father after the (now ex-) girlfriend delivers her unwanted child to him. In another scene, he considers the link between his masochism with his childhood memories of his father. Wong’s animation exposes the complexities of masculinity, though filtered through an absurdist lens.

Similarly engaging with parenthood was Dong Jinling’s pair of works, Dong Jinling 2-2 (2011) and 2-1 (2012)—the former, a video of the artist squirting milk from her own breast, and the latter, a photographic self-portrait depicting her with one breast more engorged than the other. Dong deliberately fed her child from only her left breast to reiterate agency over her body. Dong further emphasizes that her body is more than a vessel for maternal provision in the video where she arbitrarily releases milk. Yet, with both works presented on two separate floors, the connection between the two was broken, thereby minimizing their impact. 

Some works appeared out of place in the exhibition, such as Anne Imhof’s steel and fiberglass restraint chair Prior Park (2019). Yet Imhof’s scratched aluminum works I Promise to be Good I and II (both 2019) evoked the objectification of women—compared, here, to society’s obsession with cars—through symbolically damaging the polished surface. However, intended dialogue between those works and Prior Park (2019) seemed forced, as the latter tackled, more broadly, the “punitive congress of law and order,” according to the exhibition guide.