Hidden Growth II, another artwork depicting Lie Fhung’s reflections on women’s doubts and decisions relating to their bodies and lives
Indonesian Hong Kong based artist Lie Fhung (b. 1969) explores the tangible realities of a woman’s body in her solo exhibition titled “Corporeal Dream”, at the SIGIarts gallery in Jakarta. Profound, delicate, and with a fine sense of what the body is about, the works, which speak of a thorough research linked with personal experience, reveal a unique artistry.
Part of the exhibition still deals with the dilemma of whether to have children explored in earlier exhibitions. And while the theme came about after her personal struggle some years ago, her work now encompasses other women’s doubts and decisions relating to their bodies and lives. Her research includes a questionnaire designed for women who ordered a scrapbook kit, made and sold as part of her digital scrapbook business on ztampf.com.
She also explores the issue of ancestry that she, as a Chinese Indonesian, had to face in cases of discrimination. Once again, an issue she has experienced personally transpires in her work, growing beyond the personal. While she uses 19th and 20th century European traditions to display ancestral and family portraits in framed clusters as a model, it is the potential parents and their descendants that are the focus of her work. “It is also a homage to those that could have been or would have been embryos, to those seeds and eggs that never met to procreate,” she adds.
Lie Fhung’s Hidden Growth III, a work inspired by the dilemma of whether to have children, part of her “Corporeal Dream” exhibition in Jakarta.
Lie Fhung says images were created on a Mac computer using a Wacom tablet and a stylus in Photoshop, substituting conventional canvas and paintbrush. They were then printed on quality artist canvas as well as ink, and coated with a protective layer, resulting in prime quality prints.
Reinvented with the computer, or computer-painted, the images are set in a dim atmosphere, resembling photos that have been lying in drawers for dozens of years, but in the artist’s mind, reflect the doubtful future of the embryos.
Delicate and with a dreamy sense of tenderness, the man and the woman on the archival quality digital prints have wings, as if they were ready to fly into the adventure of procreation. Wings also appear in images of pregnant women, indicating access to any kind of freedom, including to reveries of fetuses in various positions. Not surprisingly, Lie Fhung also explores dreams based on reality, thoughts or figments of the imagination. “I dream every night,” she says. The dreams are so intense, that she will always feel tired when waking in the morning.
Images from the Dream Archive series feature in 19 boxes, called portals, along the largest wall of the gallery. Each box, an altered KOLO Havana box of 12.5 x 9.75 x 2.75 centimeters, has a “door” that can be opened revealing the many subjects and objects of dream.
One box contains an acrylic painting of a black-colored image of a figure hanging in suspension against a background of dripping paint, while another box shows a ceramic fetus behind an optical glass, or a fetus behind bars, covered with beautiful decorations in the fashion of lace.
One portal depicts the heads of a couple made out of ceramic, with fine copper protruding out of the portal, which can be interpreted as dreams disappearing like smoke in thin air. Family portraits on archival quality digital prints emanate a sense of yearning and melancholy.
The more realistic Hidden Growth series deals with tumors and cancer that so often secretly attack the woman’s body.
The dark cloak made out of silk that comes down from the figure as an elegant long veil, is Lie Fhung’s metaphor covering the harshness of what is revealed so broadly and clearly in the near-realistic installation of ulcers next to it.
“Corporeal Dream”, an exhibition with three themes that share a concern with the physical body and the subconscious and spiritual realm, shows how Lie Fhung has successfully blossomed from an exquisite ceramic artist, whose work Flight was purchased in Korea, to an artist of multimedia expertise, while continuously deepening her artistic concepts.
This is Lie Fhung’s third solo exhibition since 1995. After obtaining a Bachelors of Fine Arts, majoring in Ceramics from the Bandung Institute of Technology (1994), she began attracting attention in her second solo exhibition at CP Artspace in 2005 with her work Flight featuring delicate wings made out of translucent porcelain.
It became one of the two works representing Indonesia in the fourth CEBIKO Biennale 2007 and was subsequently added to WOCEF’s (World Ceramic Exposition Foundation) permanent collection. The same work also features in the book Contemporary Ceramics by Emmanuel Cooper, published by Thames and Hudson, October 2009.
— Photos by Carla Bianpoen
Corporeal Dream
A solo exhibition by Lie Fhung
20 November – 12 December 2009
at SIGIarts Gallery
Jl. Mahakam 1 No. 11
Jakarta
62 21 726 0949
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