LIU Shih-Fen’s Solo Exhibition: Müllerian’s Garden

Throughout the course of our lives, many discriminations and conflicts have arisen due to gender difference and gender awareness. There are also many social and cultural inequalities in terms of language and the identification of male or female. The Müllerian ducts tell us that human beings aren’t so different from each other at the beginning of embryonic development. This is why I am using Müllerian’s Garden as a form of creative expression in hopes of providing a chance for us to relearn what we think about each other.

Hallucinogenic plants are used in some religions to give people access to the divine; meanwhile, they also have therapeutic properties in medicine, where the hallucinogenic effects depend on the dosage we use. These plants exist quietly on their own. It’s the humans who approach them, getting close to them to get a temporary break from reality. The satisfaction of leaving the reality of hardships, or perhaps the escape from reality to a higher place, is like the yearning of the heart. There is a fine line between the unreal and the real. Hallucinogenic plants are like an intermediary between the two, leading one to a place beyond reality. One can be fuzzy in boundaries; however, sometimes boundaries are needed so that people know where to draw the line. Therefore, the works in Müllerian’s Garden is not so much about binary opposition, but the fact that we can have the truth of both sides simultaneously.

In the paintings, the goat-head human body is committing acts of violence toward the androgynous hermaphrodites. What I want to convey is how this figure resembles a socio-culturally constructed hegemony over the gender vocabulary. For example, some people look down on guys with strong feminine traits by calling them indecent names; some feel uncomfortable with girls with overtly masculine looks. Whether the conceptions are taught by their parents or the result of the social and cultural construct, my question is: Can’t we be more inclusive in this regard, like the snails that are hermaphroditic creatures, characterized by having both sex organs?

The main subject in Night Drift is the uterus body or the Müllerian ducts—the organ shape of the internal reproductive system. I combine it with some laboratory glass apparatus to present it like an architectural body. Then there are several black birds or crows. To be more precise, they are a particular type of crows: ravens. These creatures travel from one place to another, from one shore to another, sometimes symbolizing transition and crossing that are related to boundaries. The crow heads are removed and their feet are my own. Sticking out of their necks are a lump of flesh, a symbol of carnal desire. These crows are merely a transition. The imagery of crows is considered by many cultures to represent bad omens. But in actual fact, they are intelligent animals. They are associated with bad omens only because of their ability to foretell bad events such as disasters and storms. From such an image of crows, we can associate them with human life—we have both shortcoming and merits because life is a combination of the two.

We see from medical textbooks how the human embryos develop in the first eight weeks. Without seeing these depictions, we have no way of knowing what we look like in the early embryonic stages. In the system I am familiar with, an embryo is life at its primordial beginning. It has no thoughts of its own. What it represents is a single, pure state. Night Drift, Santa Embryo, chromosomal images, Müllerian’s Garden Sheep Wandering and Müllerian’s Garden Still-Life, all of these creations are actually my wish to return to the purest form of human beings. This exhibition is my hopeful way of putting this idea and feeling into practice.