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| Immanence: Sticking Close to the Dust, Crawling Forward |
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text by Juin Shieh
What can a frame contain? My paintings have always managed the world within a frame, a platform that projects the personal stages of life. Not having rested since the turn of the century, within the revolving door of 2010, I continue with the concept of “Immanence” within the revolving door of 2010. Taming my expressive inertia, I carefully examine the feminine side of humankind’s lineage. In a contradictory, yet impossible not to compromise, contextual vibration, images and a dialogue between the mind and the body are created using charcoal to draw and erase. These echo and decompose Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908~1986) tension towards the immanence1 and différance2 of women’s role as the “second gender.”
In the Western context of lineage, Simone de Beauvoir holds a pessimistic reading on the female body believing that, relative to the positive transcendence of men, women will always find it hard to escape the fate of a Immanence domestic life. When men were out making history, women were locked away in the houses that men arranged, like Sisyphus performing maintenance day after day... endless labor and consumption with no cumulative results. Mute women hide themselves amongst the furniture and dress up like the decorative patterns of furniture. They sometimes must show life and warmth, and other times must be silent like objects to prepare the habitat and comfort zone for men after they are weary from creating history. Passive and quiet with no chance for personal expression, women look at themselves through the eyes of men with an absence of creativity. From the perspective of women examining art history, this is a background trauma. From the perspective of endless housework, this is fate. A woman puts on makeup for those that she loves, like appropriate curtains or wallpaper matched with furniture. From the perspective of making oneself up, this is a type of forced sexual self-discovery. As a twenty-first century woman artist, I try to march forward, crawling against the dust of the ground, confined within a Immanence spectrum.
One day when a friend visited, and saw the book, Salon3, on my dinner table with its cover of a powdered-up, wealthy nineteenth-century lady, he immediately exclaimed: “It looks like she’s wearing window curtains!” Attending a friend’s wedding and seeing the bride’s beautiful wedding clothes as just prototypes for curtain designs, I can’t help but ask, is this a type of ceremony celebrating a woman’s entrance into a state of immanence? From the timeless movie, Gone with the Wind4, the lead female character, Scarlett, is forced by the American Civil War to go from a life of luxury into poverty. To raise funds to revitalize her home, she dolls herself up to ask for help from her former lover. She rips off the dark, decadent curtains of a mansion and sews it into a narrow-waist wrap skirt, then revitalizes her facial tone to recapture her old charm. I thought about the curtain cloth, which had an endless decorative pattern of vines that extended onto the adjacent wallpaper. I thought of my mother and women in general, comparing them with my efforts to rid myself of this fate derived from the trauma, fate, self-discovery shot from the position of “immanence,” or my own attempts at creating from research.
Can the experiences of women do without men? Can the expectations of men be removed when looking at the unique nature of immanence? Starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s pessimistic existence, French women researchers such as Julia Kristiva (1941~), Luce Irgaray (1932~), and Helene Cixous (1937~) stood on independent platforms of deconstructive thinking to unfold the experiences of women. Iris Marion Young’s (1949~2006) experiences as a woman5 further highlights the female experience and the vocabulary of the female body. Over the past four decades, women’s studies aimed at departing from the male thinking have been a shackle on female cognition. The body experience has become the basis for highlighting personal natures. Creativity is not generated for the sake of creation, but to soothe wounds, escape fate, and delve into deeper stages of self-discovery. Women’s experiences provide a rich context different from that of the lives of men, letting creativity organize the dance between life experience and ideology. With the multiple roles in my busy life...taking care of a child’s happiness, satisfaction, or anxiety, I charge into the immanence experience, while attempting independent thinking.
In “Immanence,” I use the endless decorative pattern of vines from window curtains, covering the curved wall with hundreds of various sized circular and oval-shaped paper. These circles and ovals are shaped like a lady’s makeup mirror, but with blood stains on the edges. These symbolize a Immanence nature with blocks of wallpaper peeling off like bleeding flesh. This type of derivation from “immanence” embodies a female researcher’s trauma, fate, and self discovery? Or is it art creation that arises from this topic? Peeling away layers of the self, one expects to find trauma. However, losing oneself in the creative process while in a studio, all negative burdens that come with being a woman fade away; only the repetitive processes of creating and pondering about curtains and wallpaper remain. On tissue paper, I form decorative patterns and lines. Swiftly using an eraser to rip the fabric of the paper along charcoal lines, the lines lose their perfection as sharpness fades into shadows from those tears. This expresses the fibrillation that occurs due to confusion. For many years, I have used oil paints combined with wet adhesives to create my works. Within the engulfing realm, vivid colors and miscellaneous pen marks intertwine to form a melody. In “Immanence,” I explore every corner of the paper when sketching, as I practice my inner immanence. At the same time, I discover the life force behind creating art.
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1 Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” depicts men as the creators of history (his-story), while women are confined to their fate of repeatedly maintaining the household; women, lacking in substance, cannot create history.
2 Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) coined the term, “différance.” A notion that meaning is forever "deferred" or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers.
3 Salon，Verena von der Heyden-Rynsch，Translated by Chang Chih-Cheng，Sinobooks，2006
4 Gone with the Wind, directed by Victor Fleming, U.S.A.
5 Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, Iris Marion Young，translated sections，Cite Publishing Ltd.，2007. |
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