Collective voice in arts

Without working in a collective, female artists have seen flashing collective strokes to challenge stereotypes and inequality. Collaborative art across genres only amplifies the collective message to be heard. Wang Yuke reports from Hong Kong.

When it comes to the might of collective endeavors in challenging an unjust stereotype, questioning a deep-seated bias, or mending social ills, one needs look no further than arts and cultural events in Hong Kong, where artists from the same art field or across different disciplines tap into their distinct artistic licenses to communicate the same message.

It isn't a stretch to say that female artists are the avant-garde in arts collectivism.

A cursory roam around a showroom featuring a cache of 20th century and contemporary artworks, and presented by Phillips - one of Hong Kong's leading auction houses - could leave one with nothing, but the experience of color bombardment and bewilderment courted by surrealistic shapes and abrasive compositions. A revelation would follow a mindful examination - many female artists, coincidently, employ their art to convey a similar mojo that celebrates women's physical, mental and social freedom. Putting it into a historical context, however, it may not be a coincidence, since women have collectively been subjected to inequality. They're now collectively throwing the vestige of stereotypes out of the window.

In Phillips' 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening and Day sales, a cluster of women artists make use of their hard-earned attention and prestige to counter the female objectification undercurrent, voice discontent about gender inequality, and seek emancipation from the male gaze. Take Polish artist Ewa Juszkiewicz's works for example. "When a woman is seated as an object of a portrait, her pleasing look is expected. But this is completely overthrown, erased, in fact and replaced by organic matters (commonly flora and fauna) in Juszkiewicz's works," says Derek Collins, senior consultant to the Chairman's Office, Asia, at Phillips.

"Another prominent feature of some art at this sale is to present women staring directly at the viewer, like in the case of Tania Marmolejo, or many of the West African artists, to force the viewer into a kind of acknowledgment or empathy," explains Collins. Two Sides by Marmolejo, which was sold for HK$504,000 ($64,770), commands a somewhat eerie, but riveting pull-and-push effect, where two look-alike girls uniformly stare at the viewers, their oversized eyes inviting a direct soul dialogue with the audience without any reservation, ambiguity or meekness.

Young female artist Caroline Walker makes women's social, cultural and economic importance the focal point in her cinematic paintings. Her piece, The Masquerade, which sold for about HK$3.9 million, lends itself as a window, literally and metaphorically, into women's overlooked or unpaid labor and contributions to societies.

Many of the fine works in Phillips' sales in Hong Kong are also addressing queer issues, hitting the nail on the head in women objectification. "Christina Quarles comes to mind because she's interested in queer bodies and in tactile sensation, not just visual, and depicts her feminine figures as touching and, sometimes, noticeably in profile or with closed eyes, or looking anywhere, except at the viewer," explains Collins. "The body, sometimes, represents the complexity of identity," which is the kernel of the argument these female artists are trying to broach. "Some women artists in this sale depict an enlarged, somewhat grotesque female fleshiness," says Collins, to turn the conventional expectations of female beauty upside down. The deformation and distortions of body parts, a signature in Swiss-born artist Louise Bonnet's absurdist figurative paintings, shouts aloud the protest against society's expectations of a visually appealing female body. Her latest collection of works, aptly named Onslaught, was showcased in May this year at the Gagosian gallery in Hong Kong - her first solo exhibition in Asia.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, illuminating the artistic flair and articulateness of women artists around the world in collectively calling for an egalitarian future. "There're many, many more (examples) of conveying something of the complexity, variety and creative variation in women's art today," says Collins.

Arts collectivism is not wholesome new as arts from history to present what have been resorted to by artists as a tempered and less aggressive response to, and "as an intervention or a corrective to specific social injustice", opines Collins, who is also the dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.

"This injustice could be an actual discrimination, based on a legal, racial, gender, class or other basis or some combination of these." In other words, grievances toward social injustice breed collectivism in the art field even though they may not really work collectively.