‘When I was eighteen, I became a whore. Driven by desperation, I sold my body to men who sustained me financially in exchange for my sexuality. If I hadn’t taken up that job I would not be here today.’ Though the sex worker Lisa brought up the artist Lisa, we want to reexamine and question everything. The bodies of women being exploited exist in various forms in a capitalist and patriarchal world, whether it’s the disabled mothers in rural China or the girls who look like celebrities in California. How can we reclaim our narratives and power?
In the exhibition “Chains,” three female artists summon succubi, sacerdotal, and sorceresses through mediums of photography, installations, sculptures, and 3D Modeling. It is a gathering to reexamine love and desire, motherhood, and the purchase of intimacy within the capitalist world.
Qiyuan Xiao’s 3D video imagery of Dream of the Red Chamber re-chanted the verdict on women’s conditions, as spinning cyber maids give birth from iron chains and transform into metallic butterflies. Luyao blends the podium of a party congress and wedding ceremony, hands smeared with blood and fragments of news, contemplating whether to put on or take off the starry ring and necklace. In any case, the red thread of the matchmaker has become a red chain on the ankle and thumb. Lisa’s photography series, “Philia,” compiles her experiences of sexual fetishes into an A-Z dictionary, with wire-filled red hearts exposing veins, pulsating amidst various tortures.
“What does love mean/what does it mean ‘to survive’/ a cable of a blue fire rope our bodies” (Adrienne Rich).
The blue fire is an iron chain. The blue fire is blood vessels. Embodying fear, hatred, revenge, and dependency. As George Bataille said, the prostitute’s sacrifice is divine because her entire life is devoted to transgressing taboos and boundaries. In the reversed chains of power, capital, and transgression, “she” is both a priestess and a sorceress.
Date & Time
July 15 – August 25, 2023
Closing Reception
August 19, 2023
Curators
Qiyuan Xiao & Jiaoyang Li
Artists
Lisa Wang, Lulu Luyao Chang & Qiyuan Xiao
For more information, please visit:
https://accentaccent.com/Accent-Sisters
https://www.instagram.com/accentsisters
About Artists
Lisa Wang is a New York City-based image maker exploring themes of nonconvention and psychosexuality. With a background in psychology and classical training in the arts, Lisaauthors images that are intersectional in their influence and idiosyncratic in their execution.
Lulu Luyao Chang is a multimedia artist currently based in New York who primarily works in installation, sculpture, and video art. Born in Japan, and raised in Beijing, they have been subjected to and struggled to overcome, a politics of the unsaid—whether through social norms or outright repression, many important issues surrounding sex, recognition, and labor are silenced in the places they have lived. Identifying as non-binary, they constantly strive to amplify the voices of China’s sexual minorities—from women to members of its often-repressed LGBTQ community—to make them heard within the blaring, chauvinist rhetoric of national becoming and to work towards a more inclusive historical archive. They got their bachelor’s degree in art history major from Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China in 2019 and currently study at the School of Visual Arts in MFA Fine Arts program in New York.
Qí Yuán Xiāo 肖淇元, Digital Artist, Illustrator. Born in Shenzhen, China. Based in New York &Shenzhen. Graduated from Parsons School of Design | The New School, majoring in illustration. Create art about feminism, Chinese culture, mental health, and some cute stuff.
About Curators
Jiaoyang Li is a poet and interdisciplinary artist who works across text, video, and performance. She is the Co-founder of the Accent Society and Accent Sisters Speakeasy Bookstore.
Qí Yuán Xiāo 肖淇元, Digital Artist, Illustrator. Born in Shenzhen, China. Based in New York &Shenzhen. Graduated from Parsons School of Design | The New School, majoring in illustration. Create art about feminism, Chinese culture, mental health, and some cute stuff.
About Accent Sisters Speakeasy Bookstore and Gallery
Accent Sisters: Speakeasy Bookstore and Gallery, based not in New York, serve the female and LGBTQ community. We love text-related, narrative-driven, cross-media work made by Asian female and queer artists.
(text & photo courtesy of Accent Sisters)
