By Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen
As a Woman, What Is My Home / Nation?
British writer and feminist Virginia Woolf once mentioned the relationship between her country and her being a woman while discussing her pacifist philosophy: "You go to war to satisfy men's unique instinctive love of war. You go to war to obtain benefits that I never had before and that I cannot share in the future. I certainly don't do it to satisfy my instinctive needs, nor to protect myself or my country. Actually, as an 'outsider,' I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world."1
It may be that not every woman agrees with Woolf's internationalist view that "my country = whole world." But it's probably true that most women regardless of whether they are involved in politics or not can identify with the assertion that they are "outsiders" in their own home/nation. Why are women so incompatible with their home/nation? Maybe you can say that, if you are a woman, when you sense that your home/nation is a set of clothing tailored for someone else, what can you do to make your home/nation a set of clothing that fits you?
An artist who also happens to be a woman, Wu Mali's artistic development reveals her art and her life, and her dialog with the above-mentioned quandary.
Wu Mali: As a Woman, My Skin Is My Home / Nation
After more than twenty years of following the Taiwanese Women's Movement, Wu Mali has seemingly found her own answer. After long-term observation, she has discovered that the existence of a home/nation in Taiwan, and its values and mechanisms, all take men as their center. Women are utter "outsiders" in this kind of system. If she wishes to share the resources of the patriarchal state,the fastest method is to change herself into a man and play by men's rules. But Wu Mali feels that this kind of "sex change" approach only strengthens the central patriarchal mechanism of the home/nation, and certainly cannot change women's situation. Accordingly, she has been inspired to think about how to get on with her life without changing into a man, and without following the rules men play by. Can she forge different values, and transform her home/nation or perhaps we should say the place where she is into a space where everyone can feel comfortable?
Wu Mali's answer is characteristically perceptual. Addressing the inflexible systems and laws of the patriarchal state, she seeks to emphasize her real sensation. Her sensation is of using her heart and every cell to breathe happily. She therefore says that her "skin" is her home/nation, and because this "skin" represents direct contact between a person and the external world, it is like sensation. "Skin" also symbolizes a sense of touch that is neglected in comparison with the visual sense, implying that the artist wishes to create an alternative set of values. You can go further and say that because the "skin" is inseparable from the human body, one's home/nation follows one wherever one goes. This is very consistent with the logic of Virginia Woolf's "country = world" assertion.
Wu Mali created Secret Garden in 1999 at the planned site of the Chiuchiu Peak artists' village in Nantou County. In this work, one glimpses a vibrant flower garden hidden beneath the ground in a barren wasteland, giving a feeling of delightful astonishment. Wu Mali has put no great effort into cultivating/destroying the land; instead, she has only dug a tunnel following the topography and created a fresh and comfortable space. This space lets people immediately sense the beauty and wonder of nature. The scars of indiscriminate logging and cultivation by the patriar chalhome/nation are visible everywhere throughout the land of Taiwan. In contrast, the Secret Garden creates a kind of miracle, a different kind of space, sensation, and strength. As far as Wu Mali is concerned, this kind of hidden " visionary realm" is an alternative world apart from Taiwan's patriarchal home/nation values, a world that she has created as a woman.2
The Critique on Home/Nation
Nevertheless, creating a transcending visionary realm to replace the patriarchal home/nation system is not something that can be done in one day. Instead, it is the sediment of twenty years of Wu Mali's life, and took constant, prolonged thinking and study.
A year before she installed Secret Garden, Wu Mali held the solo exhibition "Treasure Island" (1998) at the IT Park Gallery in Taipei. "Treasure Island" revealed Wu Mali's many years of reflection on her home/nation, and contained such works as the documentation of Epitaph(1997), the documentation of Taipei Fine Arts Motel (1996), Stories of Women from Hsinchuang(1997), the documentation of Formosa Club(1998), and Birds Slide Over in the Sky (1998). It can be said that "Treasure Island" represents the artist's sweeping critique of Taiwan's home/nation system from the angle of her concern for people, the land, and history.
1. "Absence of Women" in the Patriarchal Home/nation
In the "Treasure Island" exhibition, Taipei Fine Arts Motel(1996) protested that year's Taipei Biennial. The 1996 Taipei Biennial attempted to rebuild Taiwanese identities and subjectivities. The scale of this exhibition revealed that its architects wished to develop it as Taiwan's first international biennial art show. Nevertheless, although this kind of exhibition showed bits of liberation and progressive thinking, it was completely conservative and backward in its gender structure and aesthetics. Not only did very few women artists participate in the exhibition, but the works in the "Sexuality and Power" section which concerned Taiwanese women /artistic development were full of sexualized and demonized women's bodies. The exhibition completely expressed a kind of sexual outlook centered on narrow men-centric heterosexuality and conforming to Taiwan's patriarchal home/nation system. Ignoring women's feelings, this outlook completely revealed egotistic men-centric thinking.3
Taipei Fine Arts Motel is Wu Mali's bitter denunciation of the 1996 Taipei Biennial's "absence of women" and "sexualized pictures of women." Wu Mali first withdrew from the exhibition, and printed small advertising cards for the "Taipei Fine Arts Motel," which is a direct allusion to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum the exhibition's organizer. During the period of the exhibition, Wu Mali went to Nanking East Road, Linsen North Road, and other places in Taipei where there are many hotels, and gave out her beautiful hotel cards which announced "relaxation for only NT$20." She afterwards wrote a strongly-worded article that was published in China Times: No Feminine Presence Behind the Scenes at the 1996 Taipei Biennial.4 This article protested the exhibition's aesthetics of sexual violence and unequal rights of two sexes to interpret Taiwanese identities and subjectivities.
It is regrettable that Wu Mali's criticism of the exhibition's "absence of women" was misinterpreted by many people as an attempt to seize the power to speak, which is actually a gross oversimplification.5 In fact Wu Mali's abrupt withdrawal from the exhibition was certainly not, in the complex interpersonal politics of Taiwanese art circles, an effort to seize the power to speak. Wu Mali's criticism of "absence of women" was actually just the tip of an iceberg. Among Wu Mali's subsequent artistic achievements, we can see clearly that the Taipei Fine Arts Motel activity was an attempt to expose and reflect on the larger and more pervasive patriarchal home/nation system and the cultural problems it entails.
2. "Traffic in Women" in the Patriarchal Home/Nation
Displayed in the "Site of Desire" exhibition, that is the 1998 Taipei Biennial, Wu Mali's work Formosa Club primarily explores the political economics of Taiwan's sex industry. Wu Mali's installation in a corner of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum resembled one of the eastern/western hotels that are common in the Chungshan North Road/Linsen North Road area of Taipei. Tablets reading "Of the Mankind, By the Mankind, For the Mankind" and "Serve with Flesh" were hung in the entrance of the hotel. The red, subdued lighting in the hotel excited viewers' scurrying sexual desires. The main corridor through the hotel was lined with inconspicuous dark rooms. At the far end of the corridor, a gleaming pig's head faced viewers and laughed.
This is a typical Wu Mali's joke. The seemingly realistic setting reveals that it is all a parody. Most of the time, Wu Mali deliberately prevents viewers from entering the club, and only allows them to peek in from outside. If someone could enter the club to visit/transact business, then Formosa Club would be only a hypocritical legal club, because it is located within the city government-administered Taipei Fine Arts Museum. But, what is her parody for? Or, what kind of effects does it attempts to make? Perhaps, the audiences look forward to entering the club out of at voyeuristic curiosity. However, the artist refuses to satisfy their desire. Thus the parody prevents the artist and the audiences from becoming the hypocritical sympathizer/voyeur/voyeuse for the sex industry. And the foam pig head at the end of the corridor is always there, teasing our voyeuristic desire to objectify and consume women's bodies.
It is worth noting that because the Formosa Club is a site-specific installation, the work is very deliberately linked with the site's human, geographical, and historical content. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is located on Chungshan North Road, which was the most notorious red light district in Taipei when American soldiers were stationed in Taiwan, and had also been much frequented by tourists and the Japanese occupiers. In other words, Chungshan North Road's thriving sex industry and sexually-charged atmosphere was actually closely connected with many aspects of Taiwan's political/economic/history development. While this district's sex workers used their bodies and labor to participate in Taiwan's political and economic development, they were also sacrificed for the sake of the patriarchal home/nation. While men enjoyed these workers' bodies and services via the sexual economy, they did not acknowledge the social rights of this work and the workers. The uproar caused when the Chen Shui-bian government prohibited licensed prostitution revealed the fact that the patriarchy always "trades women" to get benefits. While the elimination of licit prostitution won middle-class votes, the nation is still stuck in the old rut of "trading women is the foundation of the state."
3. The Harsh Circumstances of Working Women under the
Patriarchal Home/Nation System sometimes appear on the Another of Wu Mali's breakthrough works, Stories of Women from Hsinchuang was created in late 1997 after the artist had the chance to participate in Rita Chang Wu's "Lord of the Rim" exhibition. This exhibition gave Wu Mali a chance to enter the Hsinchuang community, where she interviewed several women who lived in Hsinchuang and had long worked in the district's textile factories. The interviews helped Wu Mali understand the life experiences of these women, whose ups and downs paralleled those of their families and the textile industry. During the course of the interviews, she discovered that most of the women shared a common characteristic: they had done their utmost to support their families and raise their children. When Taiwan's textile industry began its decline, and many men were laid off, the women workers who earned relatively low salaries had to assume the heavy burden of supporting the entire home economy.
Wu Mali used the technique of oral history to record the process of struggle that defined the women's lives and the reality of living under a patriarchal home/nation system. She then embroidered this text on violet cloth to produce an exquisite tapestry. The cloth on which Stories of Women from Hsinchuang is embroidered covers a dark, still, and semi-enclosed space, forming a place where the life histories of the women textile workers of Hsinchuang are displayed. Images of sewing machines, accompanied by the dimly-heard sound of sewing, are constantly flashed on the white screen within the space. A few sentences from the interviews sometimes appear on the screen. This was a milestone work in Wu Mali's artistic career. In it she attempted to describe women's life experiences through the eyes of working class women who had come to Taipei to get jobs. Even more importantly, Wu Mali's mindset in this work was neither entirely Spivak: Can the subaltern speak6? Although the sound of sewing machines is like that of the women's incessant "writing" of their own history with their sewing needles, it is a lingering, somber sound. The story on the tapestry is indistinct and hard to read, and bits and pieces from the interviews sometimes appear on the screen. All this exactly hints at how hard it was for the women textile workers to make themselves heard in a highly capitalist, patriarchal society.
4. Suppressed Mothers by the Patriarchal Home/Nation Mechanism
Epitaph is concerned with the process of reconstructing Taiwan's national subject through the national trauma of the February 28th Incident. While the elite men victims once reviled as "rioters" have been rehabilitated as "martyrs," the suffering of women victims and survivors has been largely neglected in historical writing. Wu Mali has started to criticize the identification with the patriarchal nation shaped by the discourses on the Incident, and developed a nation/gender focus that is at odds with mainstream Taiwanese historical writing.
She writes in this work, "His-tory has been revised: the rioter may become the hero. How about her stories?" She has employed a semi-enclosed area to create a meditative space that is profound and compelling. The excerpts from the testimonies of women victims and survivors taken from Ruan Mei-shu's book Sound of Weeping in a Dim Corner are hung on the left and right sides of the wall. The wall directly facing viewers presents an audiovisual scene of waves pounding a rocky shore. The work thus creates a space providing a painful reminder of the suffering of women victims and survivors of the February 28th incident. However, viewers will not be prompted by lack of visual identification to consume/peek at the women victims' experience of suffering, andpessimistic nor overly optimistic. Instead, she reflects on the question posed by the post-colonial cultural theorist Gayatri Spical distance, and the painful experiences of the women victims will not be forced by their visual identification to experience the violence that caused so much harm. Text is presented in an abstract manner to create an imaginary historical distance, and the painful experiences of the women victims and survivors are heard, experienced, and pondered. When viewers reflect on time and space, the sound of the women victims becomes the subject sound, and is not again externalized as an object experience. The encounter between the viewer and the victims becomes a kind of equal subject exchange process. The process of addressing the traumas of the women victims hence becomes a subject experience that viewers cannot put outside themselves, igniting the viewers' personal pain, the pain felt as the viewers "be the women" (virtual reality), and the collective pain of being Taiwanese. Wu Mali's Epitaph avoids the reenactment of violence, and uses the sight and sound of crashing waves to wash away the pain of viewers and women victims, establishing a safe, and therapeutic space. Here we can't see the identification with the patriarchal nation passed down from father to son, nor can we see the remolding of patriarchal gender order needed to restore castrated masculinity. The work thus creates a feminine subjectivity that can interchangeably take either men or women as its primary self.
5. Fathers at the Bottom of the Patriarchal Nation Identification System
Because its subject is men, Birds Slide Over in the Sky is one of the more distinctive works in the "Treasure Island" series. To be more precise, it features a group of Japanese soldiers of Taiwanese origin, Taiwanese veterans, and old soldiers from mainland China, all "loyally repaying their nation." In a time of frequent warfare, most of these men were willing to risk their lives and shed their blood for their nation/homeland out of what Benedict Anderson calls "official nationalist love," which is like a kind of attachment consolidating the kinship system. Of course these men never received rewards commensurate with their fierce love for their nation; many of them gradually faded away without any dignity. Benedict Anderson defines that the nation is an "imagined community," which testifies to the home/nation that these men faced.7 Taiwan's political development shows that the "imagined community" of Taiwan underwent an enormous transformation every time there was a change of rulers. Under such circumstances, these men were often sacrificed and discriminated by the patriarchal home/nation. These men became women in terms of their status in the patriarchal home/nation system. Wu Mali's Birds Slide Over in the Sky attempts to make everyone see the fathers who are seen as "the subaltern" in the Taiwanese patriarchal home/nation system and who have been symbolically castrated by the nation and the society.
Creating a Localised Feminist Stance with an Alternative Set of Values
In her "Treasure Island" series, Wu Mali criticizes Taiwan's home/nation system while trying to avoid reenacting a patriarchal logic. For instance, she deliberately avoids portraying masculine women, and does not make the "castrated fathers" into tragic heroes by restoring their masculinity. Wu has been exploring alternatives to Taiwan's patriarchal home/nation system and realized them in Secret Garden, and Sweeties series, and her fecollaborative works Bedsheet of Soul-Awake from Your Skin and Follow the Dream Boat.
Although Wu Mali seldom calls herself a feminist, her overall reflection on Taiwan shown in "Treasure Island" could be seen as "feminist art" asserted by American feminist artist Mary Kelly and "feminist intervention into art" advocated by British feminist art historian Griselda Pollock. As far as Kelly and Pollock are concerned, feminist art is not any kind of "category, type, or even narrowly-defined textual analysis, but rather includes both artistic strategies and political intervention activities…" From this viewpoint, feminist art cannot be classified as something like the "impressionist" or "cubist," nor as "painting" or "sculpture" nor as a narrowly-defined "alternative gender aesthetics." Rather, feminist art is a kind of political counter-thinking and intervention activity. Feminist art expresses criticism of structural and ideological prejudices and inequalities with regard to gender, race, class, and artistic level, while proposing its own alternative values and experimental solutions.8
"Personal Is Political "Collective Realization of the Subjectivity of Women9
Wu Mali and the Stitching Sisterhood Workshop of the Taipei Awakening Association produced Bedsheet of Soul-Awake from Your Skin in 2001. Similar to Secret Garden, this work radiates the energy of love. Bedsheet of Soul-Awake from Your Skin is a blazing red heart-shaped bed/sheet that was created through many individuals' hard work and mental effort. Like Secret Garden, this fuzzy red heart-shaped bed/sheet has a particularly soothing charm.
This work was inspired by Wu Mali's proposal of "making a began Bedsheet of the soul for one's self." Wu Mali feels that, although a bedsheet is only a piece of cloth, its intimacy with the skin and ability to relax the mood of the person sleeping beneath it can give it a wonderful sense of privacy. A sheet and a person's body can create a full range of possible dialog spaces, including monologue spaces (self-dialog) and love spaces (intimate relationships). When women make a tangible or abstract bedsheet of the soul, this enables all kinds of private dialogs and expresses the diverse fabric of women's culture. The process of creating this work entailed several months of intense labor from everyone involved. The members of the Stitching Sisterhood Workshop women belonging to different age groups and social classes along with Wu Mali, psychological counselor Lin Fang-hao, and the Association's social worker Wan Hsiu-hua, explore their existence and the substance of their lives through making a soul sheet as intimate as their own skin.
A video made by the prominent Taiwanese woman director Chien Wei-ssu was shown with the bed/sheet. This video documents the prolonged process during which the members of the Stitching Sisterhood Workshop discovered their consciousness of life through their artistic exchange. While the image of the fuzzy blazing red heart-shaped bed/sheet is seemingly that of a broken heart, the shattered lines actually represent a pair of wings in flight, or a pair of sheltering wings. While the artist and the members of the Stitching Sisterhood Workshop explored life and art, they gradually discovered that everyone's life experiences, in spite of their differences, shared one common point an intense longing for love. While Bedsheet of Soul-Awake from Your Skin lacks the anger of the American Woman House project of the 1970's, it adds the refreshing feeling that follows the restoration of a wounded soul. Nevertheless, in common with the Woman House project, its creative process starts from personal life/life experiences, and it represents a joint cooperative model with great inclusive power. Bedsheet of Soul-Awake from Your Skin thus reveals the personal is political aesthetics through which American feminist artist Judy Chicago opposed the patriarchal social system.10
Transcending the Space and Time of the Home/Nation System
Wu Mali began developing her The Sweeties series in 1995. The works in this series make it clear that the artist wishes to break through the manipulative logic of the patriarchal state and create an alternative worldview and set of values.
In the The Sweeties series, Wu Mali reproduced childhood photos of famous people and hung them in a room. When visitors walk into the gallery from the busy street outside, they immediately enter a historically displaced space. Observant viewers will soon discover that the famous people are all from different times and places. In addition, childhood photos of what history has labeled "good guys" and "bad guys" such as Adolph Hitler (a rightist), German woman revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (a leftist), and Petra Kelly (Green Party) are placed close together. This presentation of childhood photos is a way to draw out viewers' childhood memories, and Wu Mali successfully created a space allowing people to experience a time of innocence in this project. Moreover, when viewers try to match the childhood images with their own historical knowledge, they usually find that there is a big gap. For instance, while the thinking of the French critical historian Michel Foucault runs counter to the beliefs and doctrines of Christianity, the artist has chosen a childhood photo of Foucault wearing Catholic robes.11 It is obvious that the artist wishes to employ the spatial and temporal displacement, inverted order, and historical distance to spur a complex dialog between viewers and the photos, causing viewers to together imagine a home/nation-transcending world that goes beyond the dualities of good and evil, space and time, and men and women.
21st Century Virginia Woolf: "My Skin is My Home/Nation"
"Since so many years had gone by, and my life had reached another stage, I began to wonder whether I could just criticize, and leave it at that." Thus spoke Wu Mali.12 Having gone through the period of criticizing the patriarchal idea of home and nation, what Wu Mali has recently thought is not to criticize that a glass of water is wrong, but "if the water is bad, what should we replace it with? Or what things are even more essential than this glass of water?"13
If the patriarchal home/nation system and culture are bad, then what is more important to life? After many years as a feminist, Wu Mali began affirming her direction in Secret Garden. What she wishes to give is "perceptual", a kind of value that transcends dualistic thinking. It is a belief in the innocence of life, a belief in some innocent ideas, such as the inherent goodness of human beings, and that people's interactions should increase their mutual energy rather than destroy it. I believe that positive interactions between people can create more comfortable spaces." This has prompted her to introduce "feminine thinking" into our masculine society via her art of the last few years. Wu Mali defines this "feminine thinking" as "inclusive, intersubjective, cooperative, in progress, and perceptual…".14
While this definition of "feminine thinking" offers great potential for extension and development, it is also highly indefinite and open. Under such circumstances, what one has learned from the quasi-religious experiences and from the engaging processes is far more important, generates more energy, and motivates even more people to realize their dreams. The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts' recent exhibition Follow the Dream Boat (2002) is an outstanding embodiment of this spirit. Such embodiment and engagement might enable one to achieve cognitive change, and to sense a wonderful vision beyond that offered by the patriarchal home/nation system. This is what Wu Mali a 21st century Virginia Woolf means when she says, "my skin is my home/nation."
This essay originally appeared in Dian cang jin yishu (Art Today, now renamed as ArtCo), August 2002; was reprinted in Wu Mali, exhibition catalog, Kaohsiung: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2003; and published again in Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen, Translating Dialogue: Journeys between Art and Social Contexts, Taipei: Dian-cang, 2004, pp. 29-46. For a more recent critical analysis of Wu Mali's works in relation to gendered nationalism and historical trauma, see Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen, Beyond Commemoration: The February 28 Incident, the Aesthetics of Trauma and Sexual Difference, Ph.D. Thesis, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, UK, 2005.
Notes
1: Virginia Woolf, Three Gold Coins (trans. Wang Wei-chen), Taipei: Tianpei Cultural Publishing, 2001. The author is grateful to Ms Lin Lu-hung of the FemBooks for her assistance in checking the source of information.
2: E-mail correspondence with Wu Mali, July 11, 2002
3: Catalog of "Taipei Biennial-The Quest for Identity," Taipei, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1996.
4: Wu Mali, "No Feminine Presence behind the Scenes at the 1996 Taipei Biennial," weekly entertainment report, China Times, August 24, 1996. Wu Mali, "Soliciting Customers for the Taipei Fine Arts Museum," Liberty Times, July 20, 1996. Li Wei-ching, "Relaxation for only NT$20? Wu Mali Occupies the Museum," China Times, July 15, 1996.
5: Kao Chien-hui, "Pillow and Fist Art Zone Recalling Issues at the 1996 Taipei Biennial," The Artist, October 1996, p. 418~421.
6: Gayatri Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', Williams P. & Chrisman L., Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 66-111.
7: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983, 1991.
8: Mary Kelly, 'Reviewing Modernist Criticism', Screen, vol. 22, p. 58, quoted in Parker, R & Pollock, G., Framing Feminism, London: Harper Collins, p.79. Griselda Pollock, V Vision and Difference, London: Routledge, 1988. (Chinese readers may refer to the author's translation: Vision and Difference, Taipei Yuan Liu, 2000.)
9: "Collective Realization of the Subjectivity of Women" refers to a reincarnation of the women's conscious-raising group movement of the 1970's. In the field of visual art, the Woman House created in the US by Judy Chicago and others is a well-known example of a collective work. Wu Mali has written about this project, and Judy Chicago visited Taiwan at the time of the "Lord of the Rim-in herself, for herself" exhibition. See Wu Mali, "A Retrospective and Reflection on American Women's Art and Education in the 1970's," The Artist, April 1995.
10: Norma Broude & Mary Garrard eds., Power of Feminist Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 1994.
11: See note 2.
12: Li Wei-ching, "Wu Mali: A Mediator in Weaving a Secret Garden of Art," The Artist, June 2002, #325, p. 425.
13: Ibid.
14: See note 2.