Georgie Prefers Forks, 2021
Embodiment of a Chinese beauty, 2021, HD video. Copyright to Siying Zhou.
Georgie Prefers Forks
This is an installation exhibited at Blindside ARI (Melbourne, Naarm) in 2021. Including the works developed from ARART residency 2019 and new video work, this installation uses the permutation of the works in the gallery space of Blindside to draw focus on the social representation and role of Chinese women in Australian history. It uses various material forms and visual content to construct a narrative space, where the ontological value of East Asian women (the Yellow Woman) under the current socio-political climate is searched, questioned and scrutinized from Australian history, Hollywood-led pop culture, and the casual practice of cultural engagement in tourism. In this work, the cultural slippage of the ethnic clothing on an Asian women body is depicted through the figure of an Asian woman on photographic images, an accent of speaking English and materiality of silk dresses. The troublesome sartorial relationships offer the reading of a culturally displaced, misplaced and replaced female body. Within the visual motif of hi-lo cultural content, this work playfully indicates that the unique living experiences of the Yellow woman that are shaped not only by the histories of exoticism and oriental fetish, but also by the porous presentation in present societies. Inside the thin space between the skin and fabric, it intends to uncover an overlooked cultural and gender perspective in the narration of diasporic experiences of cultural appropriating and assimilation, and to unfold an aesthetic derived from the Yellow Woman’s negotiation between a real self and a performed self.
* This exhibition acknowledges the Wurundjeri people and the Djab Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which the works are made.