The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

‘Corporeality’ would be the way in which dominant forms of power shape and reshape materiality, how discourses produce categories and divisions between categories — human, nonhuman, person, nonperson, body, sex, and so forth — and ‘carnality’ would be the material manifestations of that discourse which are neither discursive nor pre-discursive. 16 To rehabilitate carnality, then, is to begin to resist the sinister infantilising process that the views of those dominant powers induce with depressing regularity, to provide escape routes from their rapacious leering. Yamashiro literally provides an escape route for the protagonist of AWoman of the Butcher Shop 2012 in the form of a tunnel leading to a limestone cave — sanctuary from the crowd of men voraciously invading her black-market meat stall. For Melati Suryodarmo, on the other hand, the route is a process through ‘liberation, catharsis and death’. In I’m a Ghost in My Own House 2012, this is undertaken as an extraordinary performance — 12 hours spent grinding a roomful of charcoal briquettes into dust, the trace of the artist’s presence and her profound labour registered by an empty, filthy dress hanging spectrally in the installation; the artist herself is elsewhere. For Chen Ching-Yuan, representation poses an ethical dilemma, the gaze of media discourse recasting male–female and centre–periphery binaries along the lines of sovereign and subject, of the democratic public sphere and its ‘organs’. Representation here takes on a double meaning, creating a relationship between electoral politics and technologies of depiction; neither is capable of treating formative moments of collective consciousness with the seriousness they deserve, a realisation at which Chen arrived on witnessing the objectification and distortion of the Sunflower Movement of March–April 2014, a sustained protest in which many young Taiwanese participated. 62—63 BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE