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陳明惠 |
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Between Sexuality and Desire: Liu Shih-Fen’s Art and the Imaginary World
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文 / 陳明惠
Liu Shih-Fen is one of the most influential contemporary Taiwanese artists since 1996 and her work has been widely shown at prestigious international exhibitions in Taiwan, Japan, USA, UK, Israel and Italy, including the Liverpool Biennale in 1999 and in Taiwan’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. She was born in 1964 in Taipei, and her work as an artist goes hand-in-hand with her full-time work as a nurse in an obstetrics and gynaecology department at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan.
Without any official training in fine art either in college or at university, she started her career as a fine artist in the mid 1990s, only after having attended a painting course at a private studio led by a figurative painter, Lu Tien-Yen. Her first multimedia work, Murmurs - 119 Ways to Read Heart Sound (1996) was nominated for the Taipei Art Award in 1996. In this piece, she combined her knowledge of medical science and her skills in drawing, explored the struggles of power and the relationship between men (e.g. medical doctors, usually male-dominated)and women (e.g. nurses, mainly female-centred). Her work expresses her emotions of solitariness and sadness in Taiwan’s modern, changing society.
The year 1998 was a crucial time for Liu, as her participation at the Taipei Biennale opened the door to international status, and her name has since been published regularly in a range of international reviews and publications. In 1998, Fumio Nanjo, the Japanese curator of the 1998 Taipei Biennale, invited her to exhibit and she produced The Feast (1998) and The Manifold Debates of Ruses Between Membrane and Skin (1998) at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
The Feast is an installation which consists of a life-size skeleton, lying on a silk pillow and on a Baroque-style dining table, covered by a delicate piece of lace as a blanket. The skull of the skeleton is covered with a golden mask, and between the wide-open legs, Liu deliberately attached a fake golden penis, surrounded by some chicken feathers, to represent human hair. The Feast expresses a typical early Western feminist notion, which aims to revolutionise the structure of power within existing gender relations; i.e. to transform a woman’s traditional position from object to subject, and to objectivise men by using their sexual organs as objects in art. Many of Liu Shih-Fen’s early works deal with issues related to sexuality and desire.
With more than twenty-five years experience in nursing, Liu Shih-Fen utilises her medical experience and knowledge as valuable sources for her art. Most of her works relate to symbolic images and medical texts, and she mainly uses multimedia, ready-mades and hand drawing as her media. In an interview with the art journalist, Li Wei-Jing for Artist (Taipei) in 2000, Liu indicated that ‘I will never quit my full-time nursing job to pursue my career as a professional artist, as my work in the hospital provides me with inspiration for art!’. This link between nursing and art practice is strong in her Gift (2003), shown at the First International Women’s Festival in Taiwan, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, which was a video installation depicting a disabled baby.
Gift was presented in a separate room specifically built for the work. Walking through an arch-shape gate, visitors entered a dark room with two main walls at the front and the back. Two screens were arranged, one on each wall. One of the films is a continuous video of a woman’s eye blinking and looking at the other screen, while the other (main) film is about a baby which was born severely disabled (having no skull bones to protect her exposed brain) and who lived for just twenty-six hours. The main film was carefully produced, so that it resembles an animation of a fairy story. At the end of the film, a pigeon, hand drawn by Liu, appears from the baby’s exposed brain and flies away. The artist has suggested that the pigeon represents the life of the baby who died the next day.
Beginning with Gift, Liu started to change her style from an approach identified with early 1970s Western feminist concerns to one concerning issues related to asexuality and the idea of the cyborg. Gift creates a space-like atmosphere and the baby in the film resembles a cyborg creature (because of the unusual appearance of the baby and the special effects used to beautify the film). The artist has effectively transformed a baby into a cyborg, a mixture of human and technology. This style can also be seen in her works The Muse Virus (2005) and The Clinical Path of the Sphinx (2005), exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei and the Eslite Gallery in Taipei, respectively.
The Clinical Path of the Sphinx consists of scanned medical photographs of Liu’s inner organs, twelve pieces of drawings, nine egg-shaped sculptures made of macromolecule materials and a life-size fibre-glass sculpture in the form of the artist herself. The work represents stories in the Bible and de-codes religious symbols by juxtaposing these images of herself with twelve kinds of herbs and plants, including the opium poppy, agave, datura stramonium, etc. It follows her style of producing an asexual cyborg, but this time, the depicted object is the artist herself. At the international art fair, Art Taipei 2008, Liu exhibited a digital print, The Blood of Christ (2005-2007), which was an extensive development of her previous work, The Clinical Path of the Sphinx. In this piece, she interspersed several images of her own naked body, in the style of a film negative, with several bright red poppies. The change in her media from video installation to digital prints suggested, perhaps, that her ambition was to enter the global art market, in order to gain a financial return from her art.
By examining Liu’s works, it is possible to outline the shift in interests amongst women artists in Taiwan since the mid 1990s. When feminist art was first introduced on to the island, issues of gender were predominately centred on the challenging patriarchal ideology in Taiwan’s society, and Liu’s early works reflect this trend. In the past ten years, Liu’s works have changed greatly, despite the fact that the main issue of her work is still analysis of the myths surrounding sexuality, desire and the human body. Her life as both a professional nurse and successful artist has given her a unique mind to produce her art. No doubt whatever she produces in the future will be worthy of our attention. |
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