Text | You Yuan-yi (Taiwan Art Critic)
Beauty comes at a price. A pair of high-heeled shoes allows Cinderella to gain the grace of fitting perfectly into it, but it also makes Cinderella’s sister pay the price of cutting her feet in order to fit in. With a pair of high-heeled shoes, Cinderella becomes a princess, and a girl becomes a woman. The appearance of wearing high heels looks elegant and beautiful, but the discerning people know that the inside is in fact skewed and deformed. The proportion of the body becomes better thanks to the high heels, but by the same token, the body carries the sequelae as well. Women trade bodily hurt for beauty. Is the damage done to the body and mind worth the beauty they have earned? Or is it just like the girl in “The Red Shoes"[1] who can’t bear the pain anymore and decides to cut off her feet? Therefore, it is this questioning of women’s ambivalent psychological feelings entangled between beauty and trauma that arouses the creative ideas of artist Angel Chan (1993~). Chan uses personal growth experience to reflect on the meaning and value of high heels to her in the pursuit of a female image, and realises that “body" is the price bargaining chip in exchange for beauty. Based on this, Chan uses high heels as a foothold to explore her own creative work, and regards the physical state dominated by high heels as the entry point of her art. Through the imitation of human bones and the image of high heels, these layers of fragile bones are assembled. With these vulnerable “bone-shoes”, she blends her attitude and position on reality structure and female imagery, and integrates her thoughts around keywords such as feminine traits, medical symptoms and social values, thereby expressing a fable about the female body in contemporary consumer society.
These bone-shoes reflect the shape and shadow of the external world, and record the inner world of the artist. They become a significant carrier of her self-consciousness, and serve as a communication medium for self-introspection as well as the care for others. They have become Chan’s interpretation of individual life and the visual signs of her creative thoughts, blending one’s own life experience and artistic forms to create a dimensional manifestation involving the female body. However, the question of how to see beauty in the bones so that the two can reflect each other is an aesthetic subject of Chan’s incessant consideration and experimentation. She adopts a clear, easy-to-understand, simple and white model to convey emotions, and simulates realistic phenomena. Constructing these ingenious and pathological skeletal images allows viewers to trigger specific associations of beauty and pain. In terms of this visual expression, there are several imageries of high-heeled shoes that Chan interprets: 1. Structured high-heeled shoes: Chan uses the modelling association between high-heeled shoes and the human skeleton, such as in “Skeleton” (2021), “Specimen” (2021) , assembling a composite conceptual projection. 2. Symptoms of high-heeled shoes: She intends to imitate the physical symptoms caused by the sequelae of high-heeled shoes. For example, “Sustain” (2020) uses the proliferation of shoes to shape the visual appearance of the spine that is twisted into an S shape due to compression. 3. Representational high-heeled shoes: Chan uses the meaning of high-heeled shoes to explain her personal views on the phenomenon of female body culture. In general, while Chan seeks the definition of her own value through creation, the object element (high heels) tied to her life experience becomes her intuitive way to demonstrate the individual and collective value. And then through her multiple analysis and conceptual translation of the object symbol, the bone shoes are transformed into an important medium for her to connect her identity as a female artist with the characteristics of transferring her body traces. These bone shoes, which already serve as examples, are combined by the artist into a series of specimens that documents the events indirectly, so as to subtly highlight the beauty and pain against the overall atmosphere of the situation at hand.
There are a few points worth noting in reading Chan’s pottery art. First, although her creation inevitably reflects the collective subconsciousness of the female standard image accumulated in the context of the society as a whole, [2]Chan has no intention to reiterate about the patriarchy behind this subconsciousness. She just wants to face honestly the bewilderment of one’s own beauty, relying solely on the straightforward appeal of “to be fashionable rather than comfortable”, and to reconsider one’s personal emotional experience and value judgment of beauty and pain. Furthermore, she uses the measures of high-heeled shoe code assembly associations to transform her daily experience into universal social and physical experience, and delicately transforms the extension of individual and autobiographical narrative characteristics into a group social thinking feature. She uses the perspective of high heels to trigger the viewer’s speculative mechanism for social and cultural phenomena, allowing viewers to reconsider the world’s inertial attitudes towards social system phenomena and viewing discourse frameworks. In so doing, she composes the artist’s situation in the real world and the reality of her own physical feelings. Third, from the use of the external energy of the media and the internal spirit of expressing emotions, Chan’s bone-shoes reflect the relationship between the artist’s internal coding and external fashion and cultural symbols, giving it a ray of urban personality temperament. The purpose of the artist to increase the intensity of feminine self-awareness suggests that this pair of white bone-shoes is Chan’s questioning experience in searching for self-worth and physical power, and is the self-reflection of female artists after facing the value of social discipline. From the narrative perspective of female context and subject consciousness, she analyses the premise that women know that the pursuit of beauty is a price, and still insists on the struggling mood of pursuing it, showing women’s initiative to define the subject of self, making her work a kind of self-empowerment. Such empowerment of the cognitive attitude reveals the true colours of the Self.
This impossible bodily experience has led Chan to a sincere physical perception with which she rubs the pain into the clay, carefully shaping the experience into a deep and gentle body declaration. It is as if she performs a whispered monologue on her high heels, writing her personal experience and body language. She uses bone-shoes as the identification symbol to mould the female body she cares about, showing her perceptual observation of social life and rational experience of her own life. For Chan, the reinvented truism “A woman dresses to please herself."[3] is important. Women not only learn how to be women, but also become their ideal women through themselves. More deeply speaking, her works speak of the beauty of women and the hurting, as well as women’s stubbornness and fragility. Most of all, it is a common experience of persisting in beauty even if it hurts.
[1]Andersen’s fairy tale, which describes the story of a girl in red shoes being forced to dancing continuously.
[2] This refers to the discussion of male viewing and the patriarchal system in Chan’s work. Whether Chan’s has got rid of these gazes still waits to be defined by continuous observation of her work and development in the future.
[3] The meaning here is that women dress themselves up for their own pleasure, which is different from the concept in the Chinese idiom that “women dress up to please those who like them”.
陳安琦 Angel, Chan On Kei 