with Emma Rani Hodges, Gaffa Gallery
Feburary 2021
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‘You Will Never Own Me’ is a collaborative show combining individual works and co-authored pieces by emerging Canberra artists Emma Rani Hodges and Jacqueline Meng, both of whom are Australians of Asian descent. Their fictitious shrine to their experiences as women of hybrid cultural identities creates a space that allows reflection on feelings of love, loss, fragmentation and nostalgia for places and cultures not completely known.
The exhibition explores cross cultural identity in relation to religious trends, globalisation and consumer culture. Within this fast-moving paradigm, cultural identity has come to exist in a state of flux. This argument is backed by cultural theorist Trinh T Minh Ha who contends that within Western Society, the migrant woman’s experience is one of multiplicities and fragmented identity. The inability to fit fully into a western identity as well as the distance from reclaiming a fully eastern identity renders this exhibition as a space where both Hodges and Meng attempt to create and project our own art as identity; a somewhat utopia in the midst of living between cultures.
This is explored through the visual languages of kitsch, decoration and embellishment, as these often exist within the domestic sphere which is associated with women. They also hold different social connotations in Asia than in Australia where kitsch is viewed as genuinely beautiful, whereas in the West it is seen as a cheap, tasteless reproduction, hence implementing a hierarchy of value. Asian spirit houses are decorated with plastic flowers and fluorescent lights in both temples and domestic environments. In the West, kitsch shrines are located only in the home and are rarely present in institutions. ‘You Will Never Own Me’ contrasts the imagery and ideas of several religions, it is ironic and playful, non-linear and non-sensical in order to reflect the experience of living between cultures. Acknowledging national identity as a deliberate social construction both artists make room for their own narratives against this currently accepted paradigm.
photography: Lachlan Richardson
