CORPORAL DREAM – curatorial

CORPOREAL DREAM

“The body seals and conceals a hidden language, and language forms a glorious body” [1]

I was very much impressed by the images of fragile wings in two of Lie Fhung’s exhibitions, spread across 2005 –2008 in two different venues in Jakarta. In the exhibition of “flight” (CP Artspace, Jakarta, 2005), the partially-glazed, tiny porcelain wings appeared as if in mid-flight. Before the dark background, these objects resembled a constellation of silent stars or twinkling fireflies that slowly moved away from sight.

Some of the times, the objects seemed to find themselves unlucky, “lost” in empty bottles that were hung upside-down, seemingly falling downward and swaying from the ceiling of the exhibition space. The wings were caught in spiraling steel wires that created an impression of complexity or distortion. The strong steel ties carried us downward to earth while the blackened background brought us to an unlimited horizon of adventure. Did the coupled wings represent the eternal soul of lovers?

In her subsequent exhibition, “Sincere Subjects” (SIGIarts, Jakarta, 2008), Lie Fhung still presented such enchanting idioms. The wings, however, had spread, looking more robust. The ties that previously bound them have disappeared from the sight of the audience that had the chance of comparing her works in the two different exhibitions.

Several solitary white wings were made of strong but flexible canvas fabric. Floating at the similarly-white walls, the wings formed imaginary inverted arches, resembling a pre-flight preparation. Fantasies of paradise were still there, but they were more related to the image and presence of a female figure, whose structure resembled that of a wayang puppet. The pregnant female body, with the frames of wings on her back, seemed to insinuate something that was never complete. The whole body was full of the motifs of human fetus, just as the inside of the womb was thoroughly revealed to the audience, and a variety of tattoo-like pictures and scribbles squiggled all over the body, looking like worms. No less prominent than the image of the human fetus were fragments of the phrase “to breed or not to breed.”

Lie Fhung said that her works are none other than the embodiment of a personal project that involved all of her imaginations, fantasies, dreams, questions, and anxieties about all things personal. I have called her exhibition at the Sigi art space—and those of the three other artists, Jose Legaspi, Melati Suryodarmo, and Ugo Untoro—as a statement about the artist’s sincere stance. Yes, indeed, it was the sincerity of the subject that is not merely aware of its status as the “subjectum”, the subject-substance, but also as “subjectus”, with all the humility about all shortcomings. It is not the total subject that determines matters, but a subject that is present with a gaping hole created by the awareness about the lacking self, and therefore contains and recognizes ambiguity.

The Realm of Dreams
In this exhibition, it is clear that Lie Fhung more closely approaches the two main aspects of her own personality. The first one includes what she calls the realm of dream, which is a world that is linked with her existence as a woman. The most obvious sign is the series—which continues until god-knows-when—of “to breed or not to breed” that serves as the first part of the exhibition theme.

Lie Fhung celebrates dreams as all mental activities that include thoughts, images, emotions, wishes or desires, hopes, dreams, fantasies, and even aspirations. This subtheme is represented in a variety of images produced using the technique of digital printing: family pictures in oval frames, presenting winged men and women, the guarantors of human predecessors. There are also images of torsos and iridescent egg-like fetuses. Lie Fhung likened these images to that of the clusters of family pictures that are commonly found in European houses, following the 19th–20th century European tradition.

Is the issue of women with offspring a family myth? Or is it an adventure of the mind (“a dream”) that inherently exists in every woman? Images of women that Lie Fhung makes in relation to the ambiguity of “to breed or not to breed”, I think, more or less affirms the feminists’ idea that believes in the unbroken semiotic link between the female art(ist) and the particularity of her biological body.

At the same time, by expanding the boundaries of what she calls “dream”, Lie Fhung has linked elements of her subconsciousness with her consciousness. This, perhaps, is indeed a project that will stay ambiguous: between an (art) project about the (subconscious) dream, and dreams that are none other than the real project of her (conscious) life. Life, therefore, is the dream itself, nothing more and nothing less.

“What sense is there in continuing the present when one has seen the future?” asks Alan Lightman in Einstein’s Dreams.

The body and the altar
The second issue is related with her reflections about the body, especially the female body. On her website, which we can visit at http://liefhung.com, are female torsos hanging before a series of works depicting images of growth or developments. Apparently, this shows the link between the process of “becoming” and “being”, between the potential/possible and the actus/materialization.

Lie Fhung documents the unexpected growth of her “becoming” torso. To her, here lie two contradictory potentials: the constructive development and the destructive diseases. The two extremes are hidden behind the myth of the torso’s beauty. Is the artist creating metaphors about the social myths that give rise to the bitterness about the body and the essence of the female self? These works constitute the second part of the exhibition, i.e. “Hidden Growth.”

The third part of the exhibition, “Dream Archive”, is a project of works of installations consisting of long-lasting archival boxes. These objects are containers seemingly holding the archives of dreams arranged to resemble a portal. The contents are varied: objects, paintings, digital prints, and a variety of works that she has made herself.

Is this portal of archives actually the manifestation of the body, the temple that holds a million dreams?[2]

Or is it an altar? A personal altar that invites an exchange of words, a conversation, involving the audience and talking to them?[3]

The second part of the subtheme “Dream Archive” is a collaborative “in progress” project involving the exhibition audience or those who visit her website. It consists of a book that can store any writing, drawing, or scribbles coming from the audience’s realm of dreams. Lie Fhung will present the final stage of this project in her next exhibition. The interaction with the audience is based on the awareness to go beyond the personal, and at the same time serves as a new medium to capture public dreams. This will re-create the link between the personal and the social.

Lie Fhung says that scrapbooks are generally related with women’s habit of recording just about anything—but mainly the intimate and the personal. (Remember, for example, Frida Kahlo’s famous diary.) Touchingly, however, The Universal Scrapbook is meant to be a universal scrapbook, going beyond the particularity of the female realm and simultaneously re-affirming it as a medium that is common among artists.

Hendro Wiyanto
Exhibition curator

Notes:
[1] Quoted from Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 280.
[2] Carlos Fuentes: “The body is the temple of the soul. The face is the temple of the body. And when the body breaks, the soul has no other shrine except the face”. (Quoted from “Introduction” in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: an Intimate Self-Portrait, p. 8)
[3] Kay Turner writes: “An altar can never merely represent; there is no altar made for art’s sake alone. The personal altar always invites communicative exchange: it engages the viewer who, moving beyond the simple seeing of altar images, begins to use them, to encounter them, to speak to them” (Quoted from Lucy R. Lippard, in Mixed Blessings: New Art in A Multicultural America, The New Press, New York, 2000, p. 82).


Curatorial