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The Foot Beneath the Flower: Camp. Kitsch. Art. Southeast Asia.
28 August–31 October 2020
NTU ADM Gallery
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of NTU School of Art, Design and Media
Related Artworks
Bai Barbarella Chow (2020)
28 August–31 October 2020
NTU ADM Gallery
Singapore, Singapore
Curated by Louis Ho
Images Courtesy of NTU School of Art, Design and Media
Related Artworks
Bai Barbarella Chow (2020)
Description
Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue by Curator Louis Ho:
The Foot Beneath the Flower is an exhibition held at the Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design & Media's ADM Gallery, featuring contemporary art from Southeast Asia in the key of high-pitched camp and kitsch. Camp, as Susan Sontag has remarked, is characterised by artifice, frivolity and “shocking excess”, qualities that likewise mark the aesthetics of kitsch. Guest curated by Louis Ho, the show proposes that such excess may nonetheless encompass themes that are in equal measure canny, critical, and redolent of the realities of life in Southeast Asia today.
The works here engage with the region in various ways, representing familiar socio-cultural narratives as stylistic froth and counter-ideological glee. The recontextualisation of everyday Southeast Asian visual and material cultures within the frameworks of camp and kitsch are being embodied across installation, sculpture and mixed media works.
The exhibition title was a wordplay on the book The Flower Beneath The Foot by Ronald Firbank, and we decided to make meaning of this through a graphic laden exhibition identity which also portrays an overall eccentric aesthetic. With the flower overpowering the foot, it conveys a subversive celebration of the complication of status quo.
Filmic and textual narratives, as well as sartorial aesthetics, provide visual impetus for Stephanie J. Burt’s material explorations, while issues of feminism and gender drive her installation-based practice conceptually. Here, in collaboration with Samuel Xun, the work assumes the florid excess and flamboyant artifice that characterize the stylistics of camp.
Bai Barbarella Chow takes as its initial inspiration the culture of pole dancing, which valorises the hyper-sexualisation of the body while submitting it to the gaze of erotic desire (frequently male). Draped around a makeshift stripper’s pole is a panoply of shapes, forms, surfaces, textures, compositions and densities, constituting a performance of campiness in the material register. These objects and textiles stand in for the body of the performer here, their selection also informedby a number of films that evince camp sensibilities, including Green Snake (1993), But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) and Barbarella (1968). The trope of performativity, from dancing to acting, underpins the piece: its pseudo-body represents a deliberately exaggerated enactment of the self, a defence, as Burt and Xun point out, against the sort of hegemonic mainstream values and patriarchal prerogatives that are alive and well even in a contemporary climate of woke culture. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, “when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden.”
Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue by Curator Louis Ho:
The Foot Beneath the Flower is an exhibition held at the Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design & Media's ADM Gallery, featuring contemporary art from Southeast Asia in the key of high-pitched camp and kitsch. Camp, as Susan Sontag has remarked, is characterised by artifice, frivolity and “shocking excess”, qualities that likewise mark the aesthetics of kitsch. Guest curated by Louis Ho, the show proposes that such excess may nonetheless encompass themes that are in equal measure canny, critical, and redolent of the realities of life in Southeast Asia today.
The works here engage with the region in various ways, representing familiar socio-cultural narratives as stylistic froth and counter-ideological glee. The recontextualisation of everyday Southeast Asian visual and material cultures within the frameworks of camp and kitsch are being embodied across installation, sculpture and mixed media works.
The exhibition title was a wordplay on the book The Flower Beneath The Foot by Ronald Firbank, and we decided to make meaning of this through a graphic laden exhibition identity which also portrays an overall eccentric aesthetic. With the flower overpowering the foot, it conveys a subversive celebration of the complication of status quo.
Filmic and textual narratives, as well as sartorial aesthetics, provide visual impetus for Stephanie J. Burt’s material explorations, while issues of feminism and gender drive her installation-based practice conceptually. Here, in collaboration with Samuel Xun, the work assumes the florid excess and flamboyant artifice that characterize the stylistics of camp.
Bai Barbarella Chow takes as its initial inspiration the culture of pole dancing, which valorises the hyper-sexualisation of the body while submitting it to the gaze of erotic desire (frequently male). Draped around a makeshift stripper’s pole is a panoply of shapes, forms, surfaces, textures, compositions and densities, constituting a performance of campiness in the material register. These objects and textiles stand in for the body of the performer here, their selection also informedby a number of films that evince camp sensibilities, including Green Snake (1993), But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) and Barbarella (1968). The trope of performativity, from dancing to acting, underpins the piece: its pseudo-body represents a deliberately exaggerated enactment of the self, a defence, as Burt and Xun point out, against the sort of hegemonic mainstream values and patriarchal prerogatives that are alive and well even in a contemporary climate of woke culture. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, “when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden.”