“I do not think nudity is challenging – nudity is common, everybody has it”.1 I am influenced by the matter-of-fact-ness of these words. They have stuck with me and continue to influence my art-making. I am interested in how ideas of censorship inform how nude bodies are perceived. The shapes of our bodies are merely an accident of biology. Our expectations of how bodies should look and behave are socially learnt. Ideas of what is ‘body-normal’ constrain, suppress and censor how we hold and express our bodies. There is a social preoccupation with being proper, modest, and acceptable. Wall of Butts playfully reinterprets the human form. The repeated ‘butt’ form aims to de-escalate the tensions and shame surrounding the human body, while questioning why society accepts body-norms as if they were biological.
[1] British Journal of Photography, “An interview with Ren Hang,” February 27, 2017, accessed May 2, 2020, https://www.bjp-online.com/2017/02/an-interview-with-ren-hang/.
Ren Hang’s matter-of-fact statement, “I do not think nudity is challenging – nudity is common, everybody has it,” has stuck with me for a number of years.1 Hang’s treatment of nudity has been the subject of censorship by the Chinese government and vandalism by the public. Such reactions to representations of the nude show how disconnected humans have become from the bare organic forms of our bodies.
Through the eyes of the first organisms on Earth, the human form might appear foreign and alien. Bacteria might regard our human appendages as strange and revolting but what about our coyness about our bodies? What would these first organisms make of our understandings of ‘normal’ and the ways society constrains, suppresses and censors us from expressing and exposing ourselves in favour of the proper, modest, and acceptable. Would these creatures find our ever-changing standards of normalcy confusing? The addition of masks to our everyday lives might perplex them further.
Interpreting the human form from a pre-human perspective human is my means of querying societal expectations of normality and de-escalating tensions and shame around the body.
[1] British Journal of Photography, “An interview with Ren Hang,” February 27, 2017, accessed May 2, 2020, https://www.bjp-online.com/2017/02/an-interview-with-ren-hang/.
