Oriental Beauties

Wu’s series of headshots, recall the quiet paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi. However there is something else here that feeds into the idea of the passive, faceless woman, observed, but not observing. This is not lost on Wu, who stretches the point- the women are distinguished only by the superficial- their hairstyles, and the works are given titles such as ‘Peking Girl’, ‘National Day’, ‘June’, ‘April’, and ‘May’ that bring to mind propaganda, garage pin-ups and calendar girls. According to the artist, they are depicting women attending military/party events in Tiananmen Square, as a patchwork crossing the timeline.

Using the nude as a visual depiction of China’s history, Wu gives the seemingly personal and decorative, great weight- throughout the series we are shown changing hairstyles, the feet move from the bound, to the balletic through to the heeled. Hairstyles change from the pigtailed, to the bobbed to the waved. Wu’s choice of the nude as the canvas to convey this history complicates our interpretation further, as “the nude” itself is heavy with its own history and connotations. The nudes here move from the coy (‘1911’) to the assertive (‘1958’), the reflective (‘1968’)- a red ribbon, representing the blood shed that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, the broken (‘1989’)- a comment on Tiananmen Square, and full frontal (‘2008’).

Yoon’s work in ’13 of Blondes’ and ‘Eight Blondes’, is reminiscent of the role play of Cindy Sherman. Yoon adopts a variety of female personas from Grimm’s fairytales through to the historical. Dressed as a “blonde”, in each, we know who we are looking at by the clothing alone. As much as the silk scroll, or the chinoiserie informs us about a contemporary woman from South Korea, the Little Mermaid tells us about a contemporary American woman, we are faced with a fantasy meeting a fantasy- two myths in one.