When I first came across the pinhole camera, I found myself like a little child excited with a new toy. I used the pinhole camera to play with light, shade and time. The anticipation and the sense of mystery that are associated with capturing an image fascinated me. My pure love for the pinhole photography, however, contrasts sharply with the solemn process in photo-taking. The exposure time for an indoor picture is quite long. Thus, it requires a state of stillness in both human mind and body.
After capturing the image, if I place the Polaroid negatives in the open air, letting dust and light trigger chemical reactions on the negatives, it will generate a series of unexpected effects. This characteristic of experimental photography expands the interpretive space between the photographers and the viewers. I name these additional layers of meanings accumulated with the passing of time "the Ambiguous Space". This space ushered in a kind of nostalgic aesthetics and a sense of polarity that is often present in gender politics. These effects reflect what I am investigating: female sexual desires and its repression, and the expected roles of women in the society.
My photography combines pinhole photography with self portrait. The photographer, while watching, is herself being watched. It examines the position of female in visual media, where she is an object of desire and an object for peeping. I also hope to reveal in a deeper sense, the intrinsic female pleasure and female sexuality. This inevitably involves the issue of gender differences in gender politics: who determines the dominant and subordinate roles in a relationship? A California psychologist Judith A. Hall argued, in her book “Nonverbal Sex Differences: Communication Accuracy and Expressive Style”, that women's low social status accounts for their nonverbal skills and expressive style. Hall called this "oppressive hypothesis". Thus, when addressing the differences between two genders, we face the difficult mission of how to unravel and resolve the differences in their social learnings and the corresponding social expectations.
Virginia Woolf in "A Room of One's Own" poignantly pointed out that for a woman to create, she needs to be economically independent and have a space of her own. Woolf's voice came twenty years earlier before Simone de Beauvoir uttered her idea on how men viewed women as an other.* This issue of independence and authority over female body and her sexual desires, reflects the ongoing power struggle between two sexes. Woolf's novels portrayed exactly such female characters and issues. Yet, the problems remains.
In my artistic endeavor, I adopted the language of female body to create the sense of helplessness, repression, and ambivalence. What I tried to reveal here is the history and the predicament of the female race. Speaking through the voice of images, in the form of art therapy and self-salvation, we become slowly aware of our sexuality, which further allows us the understandings to re-investigate the power relationship between sexes. In this prolonged process, we come to realize that we are not the same as men, that we can exist freely as a woman and show care for other women, and that as we become self-empowered, we can hope to be the complete human beings.
* From Zhen Zhe Huei's writing：My Own Room Is Not Finished
