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Categories / Conceptual Photography / Self Portraits /Tags / conceptual photography / mixed media / Photomontage / scan technology / self portraits / Taiwan / USA / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / Comments Off

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Artistic creation leads me to personal enlightenment, but also helps me think through social, political, anthropological, and ethnic issues. From about 1993 to 2005, my art centered on images of myself, culminating in The Scanner Series, which illustrated how I used my art as a guide to self understanding and to help me sort through various social questions. At the same time, The Scanner Series differed from my previous works in that it was far less confrontational, and was also the most emotionally and aesthetically inspired of all my work.

The body images in this series related to a desire to reach intimacy and to the anxiety of unfulfilled intimacy. I employed a digital scanner as the camera in this series. I constructed life-size full body images of myself by scanning/photographing my body, section by section. Eighteen to twenty-four segmented images are used for each full body image. Scanner technology is normally used to reproduce. I used it to attempt to reveal my intimate self. Ironically, I saw the glass of the scanner as a symbolic barrier; no matter how accurately I express myself, there is always a barrier between others and me.

Historically, patriarchal views dominate the representation of woman. Having lived in both the United States and China, I have been exposed to many rigid stereotypes about Chinese women in the popular imagination and everyday language. I cannot see myself as represented accurately in these ideas, but they are constantly projected on me by others. It is therefore important for me to be able to control my own image as a Chinese woman and to confirm my existence by making it public. I am not concerned with political correctness or with rebelling against the social norms of China. I am interested in expressing nakedness rather than nudity. In John Berger’s words, “naked” reveals itself, while nudity is a form of dress. Although at times I address the spectator, most of the time I allow the audience to be a voyeur.

I believe the representation of the Chinese woman in The Scanner Series is unsettling. It speaks about the hybridization of ideas, the beautiful and the grotesque, the fantastic and the mundane, inclusion and isolation, primitiveness and civilization, and power and vulnerability. These contrasts could almost describe today’s China as I know it, although it was not my intention to deal with my national identification through the work.

Hopping up and down from the scanner to photograph myself was fun. In a way, I see the scanning process as a performance. For each scan, I performed for the scanner, and held still for the scanner sensor to pass through. In a similar way, in the early days of photography people had to hold their pose when being photographed.