Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists

Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists attempts a new examination of the contemporary meaning of post‒1960s art by Asian women from the perspective of ‘corporeality.’ It was developed as part of an Asian art project by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), which has carried out comparative research and exhibitions on Asian contemporary art beyond national borders. The body is a place where various ideologies and situations intersect, and it is also a locus that reveals difference and diversity. This exhibition assembles around 130 works by women artists from 11 Asian countries to explore this theme.

This exhibition consists of six sections: “Choreograph Life,” “Flexible Territories of Sexuality,” “Bodies·God(desse)s·Cosmology,” “Street Performances,” “Repeating Gestures‒Bodies·Objects·Language,” and “Bodies as Becoming‒Connecting Bodies.” Through them, it shares stories about diverse, polyphonous bodies that have redefined identity through various meanings. This aspect also relates to the exhibition’s aim of going beyond the perspective that views Asian women as ‘others’ vis-à-vis the Westerner or male and focusing on them instead as agents embodied in multilayered ways. At the same time, Connecting Bodies focuses on works that have questioned modernity while revealing the experiences of cultural otherness that have been applied to the body in the geographical and political space of Asia, as a setting where ideologies of nation-states, patriarchy, capitalism, and nationalism have been reproduced.

The exhibition also turns its attention to long-existing aspects of women’s culture, which has sought to understand thought/sensation and art/life in integrated ways. In this way, it attempts to discover artistic possibilities for encouraging ‘connections’ with those beyond us. At a historical moment when social sustainability is in doubt and a reappraisal of values is fundamentally needed, the feminist perspective‒transcending binary divisions of subject/object, culture/nature, and male/female‒can perhaps help us imagine an alternative world that embraces and connects a broader scope of being and identity.

Installation view of Melati Suryodarmo's works