Despite its name, the paintings on display in metaphor_of_human_body do not use the human body as a metaphor for other things, nor are other things used as a metaphor for the human body. Rather, the exhibition is, despite the proliferation of nudes and seminudes on display, considerably more modest in its ambitions than the title implies. The works here are all, in one way or another, studies of the female body.
Given the intellectual tease of title, it was the intellectual equivalent of being told by the girl one loves that she ‘just wants to be friends’. The problem isn’t that the feminist refrain ‘What is woman?’ is any less urgent or necessary than a question that moves along non-gendered lines; it’s that the artists’ responses saunter down a well-trodden path with little that quickens the heart or mind. It has been more than 50 years since French cultural theorist Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,’ arguing that ‘woman’ is not a biological fact, but a cultural construct, promulgated by men. As a society, she said, we have subordinated the position of ‘woman’ by deeming a woman’s culturally constructed differences to be inferior, and man’s differences to be superior. These biases, say feminists like Laura Mulvey, can be reduced to the image of the female body.
The paintings here more or less restate this position, without ever adding to or reconceptualising the discourse. Li Bo’s canvases are sensually provocative in a Mills and Boon kind of way, arousing an ambivalence towards a woman’s body as something that is both an object of worship and cause for condescension. Yu Ying’s ‘Other’s Muses’ juxtaposes a row of models with those whose bodies might be considered to be imperfect – an amputee, a woman who might be a little too thin, a woman who might not be thin enough. In disassembling the body into its various parts and then reassembling them, Yu Ying lays bare our basic prejudices in constructing an ideal of beauty.The fact that the painted models have been copied from Shanghai and Northeast China realist painting manuals lays bare the way in which the artist has always been complicit in constructing this ideal of beauty across time, from Rubens to Renoir.
It is possible, of course, to read anything as a metaphor, and these paintings are no exception. But contrary to what we might think, a good metaphor does not expand, but limits, our possibilities – in order to lead us to those possibilities that we had not seen before.
Date: Mon 22 Jul - Thu 15 Aug
Time: 10am-6:30pm
Address: Amelie Gallery East Street, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, 798, Chaoyang district
朝阳区酒仙桥路2号
Contact Phone: 5978 9698
