Hsieh Chun-Te – The Romance on the Stele from Raw series (1987-2011)
The images in the Raw series are intended to be narrative–yet what the narrative entails remains muddled due to how little is available on the artist in English.
For example: an image titled Bitches was, according to Chun-Te inspired as a result of: “overhear[ing] a journalist
friend of mine who got beaten up during an investigation of human
trafficking of a prostitution ring. Girls were captured then sold, some
of them tried to escape.”
I was not able to find the creative impetus underlying the above image. In fact, I discovered very little of merit beyond this blurb from the 2011 Venice Biennale. I agree that themes of desire, eroticism and death permeate his work. But, he’s clearly working within the Surrealist tradition. (I feel as if this is so apparent as to not need comment but to put to fine a point on it, he makes a point of telegraphing this affectation via his inclusion of bowler hats–a reference to Margritte’s seminal painting The Son of Man.
I’m inclined to disagree with the aforementioned blurb w/r/t what the above image depicts. It takes the easy route of correlating death and eroticism and suggests the image depicts a scene of capital punishment by means of being fucked to death. (The pose of the woman in the image suggests she’s still very much alive.)
And that is definitely an interpretation in keeping with the tone. Except, I read this as a far more nuanced examination of punishment in society. The relationship between the person receiving punishment and the remove at which the person who inflicts the punishment must be placed in to avoid sullying polite society by association.
I look at this and see it point to an irony. We’re not okay with this because of the context–restraint as a means to facilitating punishment and punishment as a means of retaining social control.
But this can also be read as an allegory of the relationship between pornographic performance and consumption within a capitalist, hetero-patriarchal system.
And really one of the reasons this works so well is that the author is clearly far more interested in pointing to a slippery corollary than passing any sort of judgment on it.
Acetylene Eyes 