Twelve Flower Months - January: Narcissus
Chen Lingyang
陈羚羊
Production date
1999-2000
Object Detail
Media
C-type print
Measurements
63 x 63 cm
Notes
Twelve Flower Months is a series of photographs completed over the course of a year recording the artist’s menstrual cycle. Chen Lingyang’s own body and bleeding genitalia are reflected in antique mirrors, with the traditional flower representing each calendar month. The representation of the naked body was never an established convention in Chinese art, which in itself marks out Chen Lingyang’s practice as a reaction against literati traditions, despite her use of their garden iconography. By photographing her own genitals Chen Lingyang challenges Chinese taboos against nudity and a generalised cultural disgust about menstrual blood. Her images are deliberately provocative, exploring a subject still hidden and secret. The photographs are beautiful – glimpses of body parts are lit in chiaroscuro against a black background, framed as if seen through the moon windows of a classical Chinese garden. Warning against interpreting such works through a western
feminist paradigm, Jinli He interprets the contrast between the closed nature of the boudoir, a private and eroticised female space, and the openness of the work’s central motif of the body, as a cultural expression of yin and yang.
She deliberately staged her photographs in a dimly lit, classical boudoir setting. The antique mirror in each image is an attempt to see the truth reflected, she says. Because the backgrounds are so dark, the spectator sees him or herself reflected in the glossy photographic paper, an allusion to the voyeuristic impulse. Chen Lingyang is aware of the contradiction in her work. Intending to establish a new field of vision with a ‘visual
irritation’ between the image of menstruating female genitalia and ideals of classical Chinese beauty, she suspects that what she established instead is ‘the pleasure of voyeurism,’ evoking the traditional sequestration of wives and concubines in an almost entirely enclosed female world.
feminist paradigm, Jinli He interprets the contrast between the closed nature of the boudoir, a private and eroticised female space, and the openness of the work’s central motif of the body, as a cultural expression of yin and yang.
She deliberately staged her photographs in a dimly lit, classical boudoir setting. The antique mirror in each image is an attempt to see the truth reflected, she says. Because the backgrounds are so dark, the spectator sees him or herself reflected in the glossy photographic paper, an allusion to the voyeuristic impulse. Chen Lingyang is aware of the contradiction in her work. Intending to establish a new field of vision with a ‘visual
irritation’ between the image of menstruating female genitalia and ideals of classical Chinese beauty, she suspects that what she established instead is ‘the pleasure of voyeurism,’ evoking the traditional sequestration of wives and concubines in an almost entirely enclosed female world.
Accession number
2008.025