Yuxuan Xiao
The circulated pink circle never ends ——yearn to feel again
Summary
My work represents the objectifying gaze towards the subject, making the “invisible” into a visible subject by intersecting the connotation of the symbol with a binary denotation. An example of this is the pink circle, which is a critique of the Taiji (Yin/Yang) symbol, blurring the white and black: the boundaries thus merge, with no clear division between “right” and “wrong”, but disturbing the unspoken rule of female obedience, it represents women’s subjectivity.
Additional info
In my memory, KTV always existed within an atmosphere of ambiguity and eroticism, as it was also related to the red-light district of the city: there is an image seared on my memory of scenes depicting "special services" that accidentally appeared on the screen when I searched for songs once when I was having fun there with my family – they showed portraits of young women in the “modern aesthetic “in the period of Chinese urbanization. Their pseudonyms were nouns describing female characters. In many films and television programmes of this period, this was presented as “eroticism”, euphemistically, and the songs were mostly written in a sentimental tone, from a female point of view, about wandering, being lost, based on the theme of their lack of subjectivity and their search for the other’s “gaze”.
I see this now as a mirror of the fundamental cultural infrastructure, where affection and emotion are factors in gender fluidity guiding self-identification; in the early stages of a society’s development, the lack of insight or clear vision of an image of the country/ homeland means that its boundaries become vague and ambiguous. In a similar way, then, the loss of “self”, or subjectivity, for women thus encouraged the projection of an image of an ideal self, through fiction, imagination, and fantasy, rather than being one’s true self: the blurring of the boundary between private and public created a distorted view of everyday life, while respect for authenticity/personality was erased in the social acceleration towards success in terms of power and money in a period that was still influenced by feudal stereotypes.
