JANUARY 2015
NETHERLANDS
Sabine Wong is a multidisciplinary artist and contemporary anthropologist who, though her art practice, builds bridges between nature and culture, East and West, science and art. She seeks to find common denominators and explaining complex matter into simplicity. Her work is very driven and directed by femininity and intertwined with mother nature. As an anthropologist, human behavior is her area of expertise. She brings a creative mind to the playground of contemporary life, pushing boundaries to their edge and exploring the vast liminality of our possibilities as humans.
Throughout the residency she explored Thai culture and connected with many individuals and tried to investigate the current role of the woman. She was greatly inspired by the lush nature and inspiring characters she encountered in Chiang Mai which sparked many ideas for performance based works and living installations. Through trial and play she developed her artistic practice and ideas with many experimentation.
This a resulted in a community workshop where she invited the public to investigate femininity through group meditation, sculpture and collaboration. This workshop was called Open Space for Femininity. Participants worked individually with the medium of clay to create an image of what it means to be female. Both men and women were invited to participate. They also engaged in a collaborative art project, building a giant vulva from natural materials to celebrate the place where we all originate from. As something natural and sacred.
Femininity and the female body is shrouded in myth and mystery. We didn’t even know the true form and shape of the clitoris before 1998. Science often tries to dictate what being a woman means, it says what women’s bodies can and cannot do, such as female ejaculation which is suddenly scientifically declared as being the same as peeing, rendering the experiences of millions of women to be inconsistent.
The workshop seeked to answer some of these questions: What does it mean to you to have a female body? Do you identify with femininity? Even though you may have a female body, do you feel like being one? Or do you experience yourself as something that doesn’t confirm to male or female? What is it like for you in the country you spend most of your time? How does your society view women? Do you feel free to be yourself, regardless, and how and why do you find the space to do so?
https://about.me/sabinewong