8Femmes - Matteo Pollini

8Femmes – at Tamtam8, Berlin – is the result of the exploration of eight Taiwanese female artists on the subject of womanhood. The artists at work in this project unfolded the intricate premise in such a variety of perspectives that the relatively small exhibition leaves the viewer with the impression of having completed an intense journey. Framing – literally – the exhibition is the large work of Ming-Juin Tsai, a series of drawings made on the windows of the gallery depicting different scenes taken from gay pride parades translated into massive, colored comic strips. The childish characters populating these drawings, claiming for their rights, set the atmosphere for a show that despite the unequivocal title seem to address society in its totality. Once inside the exhibition space, the viewer meets the work of Wenjei Cheng Identity is a river – three collages representing a human body formed by cutouts of body parts collected from various magazines – evoking the fragility and inadequacy of the body as sole measure unit of one’s identity. The Frankeinsteinesque features of the collage-people are carefully composed by Cheng, then printed as if this last process was the only way of fixing the ephemeral elements in a shape or form easily recognizable. Her characters are clearly non-human figures, yet the viewer’s gaze scans them in search of familiar elements that could help defining the entities depicted. At the other end of the gallery, Ching Chwang Ho’s sculptural installation The Association of Mussels remains in the realm of allusion; Instead of using pieces of two-dimensional images, Ho decides to materialize on the floor an actual mattress completed with wet stains of bodily fluids. On top of it lies a pillow, carved to reveal its feathers and a monitor that shows blurred close-up images of a vagina but which actually are photographs of mussels.

Ming-Juin Tsai

Wenjei Cheng

Ching Chwang Ho

The physicality of the human body and the cultural are the pillars on which Laza Wu’s work is based. Invisible Sadness Project 01 –Tear me apart – the title of her work – shows 33 photographs of 33 years of the artist’s life projected onto a wall covered with thick layers of colored paper. The viewer is invited to skim through her life with a computer and even tear the virtual photograph in two pieces. As the pictures get scrolled and torn by the audience, different moments in time of the same person clash in bizarre combinations, allowing a reflection on the manifold, muting identities of people as the body ages in time and relationships with society change. Hsuan Huang’s delicate work, Eight Years, extend the discourse introduced by Wu into a poetic dimension, in which all the efforts in trying to translate in words concepts and recalling the past seem a futile waste of time. A small screen is installed between the white wall of the gallery and a piano, symbol of the union of the rational world of mathematics with the emotional one of music. On the screen, a video shows hands peeling off a bunch of apples; their skin is then put in place again, glued with honey. Here, in the semidarkness of the corner created by the piano and the wall, some apples lie on the floor reflecting the TV screen’s beam of light. The piano is equipped with headphones emitting the music that generated – through the artist’s hand – the series of drawings placed on the piano itself.

Laza Wu

Hsuan Huang

Weiwei Lo documented through photography the daily moments of the life with her partner in which they met – saying “hi” – and separated – “saying goodbye” –. The work, titled Hi and Goodbye, is a series of 28 tiny photographs displayed on the wall in a horizontal line. Being so small, these touching pictures require a close encounter between them and the viewer in order to detect their detail. Hi and Goodbye is probably the most narrative of the works exhibited in the show; following the pictures displayed the cold act of documentation loses all its power and gives way to the simplicity of the daily life of two women. Each couple of photographs opens and closes a paragraph of two lives and one wishes the timeline on the wall did not have to end so soon. Ichen Tsou’s It’s my house is a video – visible through a suitcase placed on a plinth – that seem to narrate another personal story. The artist sits naked inside of her suitcase in different parts of a city. She moves imperceptibly; she seems to be waiting for something or someone yet every few minutes the scene changes abruptly and the same situation takes place somewhere else, revealing that Tsou is in fact just stating – naked and vulnerable – that each of the places are her houses, that she can be what people want her to be. The artist position within this work changes completely in her other video piece Body Building, projected next to the previous one. Here, the woman actively imposes her presence in the physical world by releasing a stream of urine on a small amount of flour which she subsequently mix to create a soft dough, the most basic material and starting point to the creation of human artifacts. Ichen Tsou’s works are shown close to Ching-Hsuan Lin’s Self Division. Lin explores the separation of one’s identity in different parts. The work is formed by single drawings – situations – sewn together by the artist using a red thread that connect and form the heads of the women populating the different situations, resulting in the map of an individual expanded in two dimensions.

Weiwei Lo

Ichen Tsou

Ching-Hsuan Lin

The eight artists selected for the show dealt with the exhibition space in a very aggressive way, with works able to tear apart the question of the construction of identity to move further in order to address problematics applicable to any human being living in a given society. These works are not shouting to the viewer where he/she should stand or what is left to be done and understood about the questions of femininity, diversity and integration; They are more clear statements, firm and convincing expressions of individualities.



Matteo Pollini 

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