In this artwork I fuse vibrator marks in a re-interpretation of Zadkine’s Birth of Venus. The vibrator (sex toy) in my art practice symbolises the feminine especially female sexuality and pleasure which is seldom acknowledged in the act of procreative sex. Vibrator drawings leave visceral traces of the performance realized by the assemblage of human and machine generating desire lines in the hope of creating new interventions and new desires that steer away from androcentric requirements, allowing the feminine a sort of liberation. It is Chinese New Year here in SEA and the colours used here especially the red is symbolic of auspicious festivities. The black Chinese ink and collage of the Chinese ‘red envelope’ distributed during Chinese New Year are harbingers of wealth and fortune.

Based on the wooden Venus Caryatid sculpture (1914) of Ossip Zadkine, Cyborg Venus is a rendition of vibrator drawings where the vibrator marks represent the female body. Venus known as the goddess of love in ancient mythology is usually represented as a beautiful woman. By disintegrating the form of the female body, I attempt to subvert notions of heterosexual love, male gaze and reclaim the feminine as a cyborg – an assemblage of human and machine capable of creating new desire lines in order to elude androcentric and patriarchal systems of power.

L’Air Art | Art Land

The second drawing “Absent at Zadkine’s Birth of Venus” (59.4 x 42.0 cm, charcoal on fine grain drawing paper) is an attempt to interpret these sculptures into my own style, I try to feel them through my computer screen. I consider the distance between my studio in South East Asia and Paris where these works are displayed. Would I be able to see differently this sculpture which looks immediately two-dimensional on my computer screen? How would the play of light and shadows in the garden affect the sculpture? I try to capture the light and shadow through my charcoal depiction. Details are lost in the shadows of my computer print as I endeavour to capture the smooth and rough textures. I enjoy working in charcoal as I enjoy creating values and tones through dark and light shades, the smooth and harsh textures that the residue of the charcoal leaves on the paper. Despite the fact that the original piece created by Zadkine is a sculpture, my two-dimensional research via computer screens immediately flattens the object to a somewhat abstract form leaving only shapes and imaginative textures.