Jing Su🕷

My work is about the challenging question of how women can develop and experience a more authentic autonomy over their own bodies? Do they do this now in today’s somewhat more liberal social systems, at least in the west? If not, how can they begin to express this basic human desire and manifest it in the world of affect and agency, the zones of emotions and actions? My art practice, and the works that result from its core philosophies, are a very personal expression of what it means to be a woman in systems largely still dominated by men. Inherently feminist in tone, it consists of an aesthetic journey through both personal and political realms, a trajectory that explores the body of a woman as a cultural artifact.

Autotheory, a piece of writing using autobiographical material to challenge theoretical frameworks, has been explored to some extent since the period of radical change in 60’s art practices and moving forward to today. The term hasn’t been defined adequately yet but is often used in feminist activity and derives from Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts as a way to transform the personal into the political. Such work questions the position of the female subject within the limited field of vision ascribed by male cultural pundits. Our subjective experience challenges the perception of the objective realities which a woman can be confronted with, and feminist strategies are engaged to evolve empowerment ideologies while also addressing the reality of the structural oppression still operating over women. 

Such a structuralist understanding, via the examination of signs and patterns in a form of embodied semiotics, allows me to dig more deeply into power relationships and their often harmful, discriminatory, and biased violence, even when expressed in a somewhat sublimated form. I am interested in making single-channel / moving image work which addresses the gendered construction of internalized docile behaviors as well as the medical and political domination of women’s physical bodies. It is a resilient visual journey from physical harm and potential abuse to a more nuanced practice of human caring and non-gender specific inclusion.