text by Huang Chien-Hung
Hou Itin's video art, based on live performances using her own body, has undergone various developments and includes various approaches. Tracing this variety, we can cite Magic . 1 and Hou's most frequently exhibited series Usurper, in which the artist combines overlapping projections and the body to create digital printing or performance art videos; Agency of Reality and Super Dirty Yoga, in which she collages, frames her shots and uses her body as a visual guide to produce exotic fantasy lands within real world settings; her earlier works Come with Me and Still Lifes, in which she showcases advertising images and objects that commodify women as ready-mades; and her most recent series, Complexing the Body, in which Hou refers to her 2003 Taipei Transformation Show and 2009 Bopi-Therapy Transformation Show series by placing her body in intensely sensory scenes of the real world, and then embroiders over images, including that of her body, in her photographs.
Regardless of what presentation format or process Hou Itin uses, the portals connecting her photography's different layers—the artist's body, imagery, patterns on clothing and settings—appear like wormholes lacking definite time, space and intention, and do not constitute a simple plane of immanence. In this case, perhaps the core of Hou Itin's artwork is not a mélange of performance, photography, and women's art, but is a mise en abîme created with different media and topics, or the self and representational imagery. Here, I would like to temporarily name this quality of Hou's art mise en abîme of the female figure; and it can be said that Complexing the Body is the most important expression of this kind of wormhole-like mise en abîme of the female figure.
As a sequel to Bopi-Therapy Transforming Show, Hou Itin created Complexing-Body, and likewise enters the sphere of daily life. Unlike the urban space she entered in her earlier work Taipei Transformation Show, this social sphere is a traditional market. Traditional markets demand urban renewal more than other areas because they are eyesores, lack refinement and are not up to sanitation standards, yet, due to their sharp contrast with contemporary urban taste, they generate another level of meaning, that of a bodily reality being concealed. Hou's first abîme is formed by the fissures between settings the artist has chosen and the images on which she focuses within contemporary urban landscapes. The second abîme is formed by the artist's bodily intervention on public spaces. Hou barges into these spaces carrying with her a whiff of civilization, but then woodenly lingers, clearly at a loss for words or action. Her gaze does not suggest she is pondering her surroundings, but rather that she cannot communicate, and her immediate surroundings are of no help in revealing the significance of her gaze or representations. The third abîme appears in Hou's blending of historical painting references with her silent and motionless body. When placed in the traditional market, she cannot make sense of its butchers and greengrocers, who likewise cannot interpret the significance of Hou's references to historical painting. The final abîme is summed up by the embroidery which tightly wraps images of the artist's body, fills it in with elements from paintings, is wholly incompatible with the reality of the site, and pierces the photographic paper of Hou's high-tech images. Embroidery, the final abîme and the artist's signature medium, is an enigma responding to contemporary Taiwanese art.
Mise en abîme allows elements that are deployed in representational space to continually retract from or float to the surface of a place outside their original world. It is interesting to note that this place forms when the artist steps into a social space, contemplates others, reflects on the art vocabulary she references, and creates interlaced patterns on digitally printed images with embroidery. Together these actions complete a complex representation of Taiwan's reality, which can be characterized by an inability to communicate. The place outside the original world of the photograph’s representational space renders Hou’s signature as enigma. Corresponding to this sign-enigma, Hou Itin's disguised body plays a role in the act of the artist entering the image, and is a metaphor for the role contemporary artists play in Taiwan. The metaphorical significance of this is desire subsumed in silence.
Hou desires a scurrying and vigorous sense of life in the traditional market. While this implies animality, her body has never undergone what those of many performance artists have, who use nudity and conflict to proclaim and represent life force. On the contrary, by performing herself, Hou is always trapped in the media’s image of a woman, and is continually making impossible adjustments, even falling into scenes where she is objectified or at a loss. Therefore animality is in an almost incomprehensible contrast with the limitless mediality that is carried by the image of the artist: digital photography, digital printing, and stereotypical images of women or images from the fashion world. Hou Itin's lingering and silence intensify the suggestion made by the blood and flesh patterns at the traditional market, which is of animals facing death and approaching their final moments of violence. Her intervention makes it clear that art is a void in Taiwanese social spaces, but obsession with this void manifests contradiction when contemporary Taiwanese artists place themselves in society. This contradiction is either anxiously avoided or dispelled when today's Taiwanese artists are addressing social issues. However, the price Hou Itin pays for her sign-enigma is the utter mediality of her own body, and furthermore, she has always attempted different kinds of mediality, and in these attempts we see traces of women being sacrificed by mass media and the critical signs of traversing gender.
Hou's image awaits, or even desires, handiwork as it lingers between animality and mediality: but her embroidery is exactly the same as her figure—the figure that is shocked and then refused by the reality of place and animality—in the sense that it is rejected by layers of media, membranes of imagery, technology and taste. As a sign-enigma, embroidery indicates two agents digging wormholes: one is the artist's body, the other is the artist's hand, and both shuttle back and forth to interlace over that which cannot be sutured. Therefore, mise en abîme in general is an impossible projected plane, and Hou's mise en abîme make explanation such as plane of immanence or psychological projection exceedingly awkward. Nevertheless, the artist coexists with mise en abîme, but it clearly prevents Hou from conveying her individual wholeness even when she presents herself. The appearance of the artist's body not only allows mise en abîme to reveal Hou’s meaning, but also reveals a void and the significance of impossibility, namely enigma. Furthermore, in Hou's work, mise en abîme serves as a way of exploring meaning: it is not a way of completing circuits between heterogeneous elements, nor is it a temporary manifestation of utopia, but rather induces difference or opposition between the possibility of production and the effect of production.
By inducing this opposition when the artist presents her physical female body, regression to critical gender performance or complete objectification, as well as the rendering of her body as an object of desire or fetish object are all forestalled. By avoiding these extremes “she” maintains her power in society, and by lingering, avoids the trap of utilitarian justice which tends to hastily objectify social problems in order to solve them. For Hou, the self does not exist in a symbolic posture of resistance, and she has, at least in form, already announced the dissolution of the self. Nor does the self for Hou exist in the presentation of the body, but rather is manifest in physically lingering, alighting on various heterogeneous perceptions, or on the individual path through continuous heterogeneous planes that Hou Itin travels. In a world of multiple and overlapping images, Hou Itin’s enigma floats above and then sinks below a real landscape within Taiwanese contemporary art.
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