Kerru

Using swathes of poetic text, Skin Deep explores the female body as a living manuscript, upon which axes of power have historically intersected with language and gender. Rooted in Kristeva’s theory of the abject, the series embraces the female body’s refusal to be contained, its capacity to unsettle boundaries of selfhood and language.

In this work, language is used in an autoethnographic manner, analysing personal experiences in order to investigate larger socio-cultural phenomena. Skin Deep focuses on the rocky, tender relationship between the artist and her mother, picking apart the lumps and bumps in order to explore the way that politics influences the minds and bodies of Asian Singaporean women. 

Leveraging the dual nature of skin, as the organ that simultaneously belongs to the individual and to society, Skin Deep’s process of inscription engages the body as both medium and message, with the artist and her mother as both subject and object. As text is layered over fleshy skin in various stages of aging, replete with hair, pores, moles and blemishes, it investigates the sheer corporeality of text, pushing a direct confrontation with abjection. In doing so, the work parodies and exposes the manner in which the female body has been inscribed upon by hegemonic forces, undermining patriarchal efforts to sanitise and regulate the female body, resisting the polished, airbrushed imagery of commercial femininity that is often perpetuated in mass media. 

Central to this critique is the investigation of language as a tool of both subjugation and resistance. The twin cinema poem format, with its multivalent, polyvocal and layered nature, exemplifies Irigaray’s idea of “parler femme”. As rational, linear language has epitomised the masculine concepts of intellectualism and progress, it is inadequate for the expression of female voices. Therefore, feminists should “overthrow syntax by suspending its eternally teleological order” via the use of “divergences” in language, introducing “the heterogeneous rupture of poetic language into a capitalist society”. This allows the semiotic chora to erupt into the symbolic, undermining dominant systems of power and reclaiming the male-dominated poetic format to become a feminist tool. 

For millennia, masculinity was associated with rationality, and femininity with nature. This served as one of the key justifications for the domination of women in Western culture. While women have been traditionally excluded from the intellectual sphere, the texts in Skin Deep take inspiration from a rich body of feminist and philosophical theory. It builds upon the teachings of theorists like Spender, Kristeva, Irigaray, Hutcheon and more, while weaving them with deeply personal statements from the artist and her mother. In doing so, the assumed connection between intellectualism and masculinity is undercut, and the ‘cultured’ sophistication of language is disrupted by the ‘primitive’ surface of skin and the subjective nature of the intimate, tender text, provoking reevaluation of one’s beliefs.

Photography has been a historically male dominated art form, with the lens having long subscribed to the viewpoint of a voyeuristic male gaze– where the distinction between the active photographer and passive subject has led to a stark power imbalance and blatant sexism in photographic depictions of women. As the artist appropriates the medium to address these biases, it is reclaimed in the feminist name, and space is carved out for feminist activism within the canon of photographic history.