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
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