- Hiding and Seeking
- Invisible Thresholds of A Home
- Yan Wenjiang
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Settled into the mountain for eternity
- Commission
Information
CV
In Chinese society, an imbalanced gender power structure has formed under the deeply rooted patriarchal system that has dominated for thousands of years. In the rapidly developing contemporary social environment, the imbalanced gender power structure directly or indirectly leads to irreconcilable family conflicts across different generations within families.
In my project "Hiding and Seeking," I am inspired by my experiences of playing hide-and-seek in an enclosed home space. As the hider or the seeker, I felt that the player’s sense of security was always uncertain. I pondered why the family environment, defined as the safest space, always gave me a complex and almost unsafe feeling.
I focused on the invisible violence and oppression against women within the family environment. In the project "Hiding and Seeking." I use human postures, gestures, and everyday household items as entry points. Simultaneously, in my roles as photographer, the subject being photographed, and photo editor, I rethink the blurred boundaries of abuser and victim in the invisible violence of the family based on the influence of patriarchal systems. On the one hand, I photographed myself as the subject to reconstruct the « postures women are supposed to take in their daily life », in a way to deconstruct and resist our patriarchal culture. On the other hand, by remembering scenes of violence in my family, I channeled the memories and feelings that were imprinted in my body, the physical reactions, and the trauma that was triggered while existing as a woman in a man-dominated culture. The body's resistance, being personal, becomes then political based on my experiences, which I used as a tool to talk about violence against women on a larger scale. By presenting scenarios that lie between reality and imagination based on feelings, I symbolically hint at the self that is imprisoned, oppressed, and attempting to resist in the closed family environment.
In this project, I'm interested in the relationship between the processes of « viewing » and « cognition » by playing with everyday moments, deconstructing the facade of this traditional daily life and discipline imposed on women in the family household, I want to guide the viewer through happenings within the images. This reflects on the power dynamics of the traditional binary structure represented in the home.
Installation View