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A conversation with Snow White
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文 / 布萊克‧卡特 (阿布)
Disney’s Snow White pales in comparison to Taiwan artist Ho Meng-chuan’s (何孟娟) version. Frolicking with forest animals, cleaning cottages, cooking for dwarves — that’s kid stuff.
Ho’s Snow White has grown up. The artist’s videos and photographic prints, several of which are currently being exhibited as part of Fashion Accidentally at Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), show Ho dressed in a tailor-made Snow White outfit complete with yellow crinoline dress, puff sleeves and a high Queen Anne collar, doing what metropolitan young women do these days:
— Snow White, hair tussled and looking like she hasn’t quite slept off a hard night of drinking, sits on a curb and watches traffic.
— Snow White comes home to her parents, pregnant.
— Snow White goes on a killing spree with a handgun.
You know, good ol’ city living. Maybe life in the woods wasn’t so bad after all.
Ho, who manages bar at Taipei’s VT Art Salon, has been using Snow White as a motif since 2001. The series began with oil paintings featuring the character as seen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but for the last four years she’s concentrated on photographic self-portraits that she digitally alters to include other characters, all portrayed by her (except for one that includes her boyfriend).
The show at MOCA features three of Ho’s prints, a chandelier, and a bed. Ho originally planned to don the Snow White suit and take naps in the gallery, but as of Tuesday the museum staff said they hadn’t seen her — maybe she got worried about would-be princes.
The prints shown are from a series called Perfect Life. In “Quiet Please!” Snow White sits in a lounge with five other, modernly dressed Hos. (This seems like a good time to point out that the artist’s name is pronounced more like “huh” than “hoe.”)
Looking at the prints displayed at MOCA, it’s not hard to see why Ho was chosen for Fashion Accidentally: She’s an unapologetic clothes junkie, and it shows.
“All the clothes in the works are my own,” she says. “The only thing I bought specifically for the pieces is the Snow White outfit.”
Ho is interested in how we judge each other and how we present ourselves in ways that invite certain judgments. She lists psychoanalyst Karen Horney as an influence, and the title Perfect Life directly references the last of ten needs Horney says all people have, but that in excess lead to neuroses:
“The need for perfection refers to the drive to mold the whole personality into the idealized self,” Horney writes in <> (1950). “Neurotics are not content to merely make a few alterations; nothing short of complete perfection is acceptable.”
Ho’s largest print at MOCA, the six-meter-wide “Perfect Marriage,” is centered around what looks like a wedding photo, with Snow White as the bride. Surrounding the couple are 15 other versions of the bride: the athlete, the bookworm, the hipster, the “OL.” (Ho informs me the last is a term borrowed from Japanese that means “office lady.”)
“Through the bride’s clothing and her behavior,” Ho says, “she changes identities.”
And the result? At the far right of the piece, two versions of the bride are strangling each other. As with Horney’s recipe for neurosis, some of the characters in “Perfect Marriage” are obviously not satisfied with the roles they’re playing.
But Ho plays the game, too. The three or four times I’ve met her she’s looked like a completely different person. The evening of our interview she was a typical, tree-hugging liberal arts college student: hair down, hippy pullover, shorts and sandals. A couple days later at a MOCA press conference to introduce the show she was dressed in a sharp black jacket with her hair tucked up into a trendy newsboy cap.
Ho leaned over to me at the press conference and giggled: “I knew [transexual Japanese artist] Pyuupiru would be all decked out and girlish, so I dressed like a man.”
Sitting under an earlier version of “Perfect Marriage” displayed at VT, I scan the different identities Ho takes on in the piece. So which one is she? The stiff, cultured one in the suit jacket and white collar? The vixen?
“I’m Snow White,” she says matter-of-factly. “She’s kind of dumb, she’s very simple, and maybe she listens to what other people say too much.”
But it’s hard to imagine Ho as dumb, simple, or obedient. That version of Snow White never rolled around smiling on a tile floor covered in blood and rainbow-swirled lollipops, like Ho does in one of her Snow White pieces.
Ho’s best, funniest, and most poignant work highlights the contrast between “simple” Snow White and the snarled, unstable world the rest of us inhabit. The pieces at MOCA are a little more subtle than, say, the killing spree picture, but throwing a wide-eyed Snow White into a bar full of carefully outfitted city girls does make us think about how self-conscious people can be about their appearance: Snow White ends up looking like the normal one.
And after a good killing spree and an unplanned pregnancy, what’s so strange about Snow White needing a drink or two?
By Blake Carter
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Revised version of an article published in Taiwan News on Friday, June 15, 2007 |
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