The Imaginary Body/ 想象身体
Jinglan Ge
The start of this project is the concern for the stereotyped beauty standards of female body in China. I have developed my own practice method. Its foothold is the insights and critiques of the sexual objectification reality, and the direction of thinking it provides to the viewers is how to regard and feel your body from the inside subjective feels, to see it as a expressive entity of yourself, instead of evaluating it from the perspective of a internalized social view. Next, I have dialogues with my friends, in which I give them the idea of changing their body images freely and creatively. Then I use these conversations as my inspiration and create illustrations to reflect the possibility of defining our bodies from within.
Imagination and illustration as my main methodological guidance and visual communication, are the two most important cores of this project. For myself, they happen at the same time and merge into one: the imagination in my mind creates illustrations through my hands, and illustrations are the entities of imagination. Imagination takes me to break the limitation of reality, break the stereotype of “what human body should be like”, then naturally there is no “what aesthetic about the female body should be like”, which is my criticism and response to the existing aesthetic. Through talking with others, I build perceptions of their inner feelings and expectations, and I create illustrations of “imaginary body” on this basis. The illustrations mixes the inner thinking with outer body appearances to give a visual scheme of what if your body is only up to your own mind. Through them, we can picture a speculative world where everyone’s body is unique due to their personalities and ways of thinking are unique . It means we are free from social relations, and we become “an ultimate self-untied at last from all depency” (9.Haraway, D. 1985, p67), “a woman in space.”
1. “Elegant Bug”
Moreover, based on this insect body, I added some of the second preferred flying animal bird features, including gorgeous compound eyes and feathers. In the aspect of superpower, I add many interconnected brains to myself. Together with multiple pairs of arms, they symbolized the power of the intelligent world and the physical world respectively. This is a pursuit of absolute independence, which means that I do not need to rely on any other person to support and prove myself in the existence of both spirit and entities. I also added a childhood pet cat of mine to this drawing, an evocative element of gentle emotions and good memories. Ultimately, I gave myself the ability to change my weight number, and I write 0.00kg, which means a complete relief from weight anxiety.
2. “Contradictory Mixture”
The human personality is a complex mixture. It is universal and natural for contradictory characters, thoughts and love to appear in a single person. We all reconcile, and grow in the struggle with our expectations and disappointments. This is the charm of human nature, which is much more attractive than a so-called “perfect body”.
3. “A Whole New World”
4. “The Meaning of Cute”
5. “The Left & Right Half”
I add animal body features to a human body. She has the wings of a butterfly, which enables her to fly. There is fine dust on the wings, which in my imagination has the function of confusing and conquering people. She has a breast in the shape of a triangular cone instead of a soft and seductive circle. Also, her pudendum, which looks like a flower made of spines, is beautiful and dangerous, full of aggression. Her right hand and feet are sharp claws, and there is a hard horn on her knee. These are the physical strength I gave her. The eye is a cat’s eye. In ancient Chinese legends, cat’s eyes can communicate with Yin and Yang, and they can discern human souls. Her skin is covered with totem like patterns, as if the tendons and vessels are flowing slowly, holy and mysterious. When drawing this half body, it occurred to me that no matter in eastern or Western mythology, we all have a certain kind image of God, which is a combination of human body and animal body. It is a symbol of great power, and also shows that the spirit of nature is a mixture of justice and evil, wisdom and ignorance. Compared with the right half of the body, the left half of the ordinary human body appears pure and fragile. There are flowers on her hair, what I want to say through them is that in reality, human beings may love nature, but it is difficult for us to trace and rediscover our deep relationship with nature. We are imprisoned by social relations. So we love flowers, but we can only put it on our hair as a decoration, but we can’t really turn flowers into a part of our body.
This illustration is a concentrated expression of the concept of imaginary body. It is full of metaphors and it even looks evil in some extent that is what give her image power and inviolability. But anyway, like the first one, it comes from my own previous knowledge. I urgently need new nutrition to nurture more such “monsters”. So, in the next stage, I began to get new inspiration from other people’s thinking.
