performance for the camera with acorns and threads, 50x75cm series of 17 , Giclée Print on Archival paper, edition of 3+1AP, 2012.
photographed by Ferry Tan.
Self Portrait (with Acorns) is an extention of the artist's previous work, Self Portrait (with Banana), 2011. Similarly approached through puns, the body who identifies as both Chinese and Christian creates a series of suspended movements captured for the camera. His penis is pressured by the constraint of the threads weightened by the acorns, resulting in a pendulum.
Borrowing to an episode of the frescoes done by Michaelangelo for the Sistine Chapel, acorns are called glans in old Italian which angered the Church due to its sexual mockery. In this series of photographs, the hanging acorns as a visual extention of the body's genital also pays reference to the eunuch and their hung penises, a practice during ancient Chinese dynasty.
The images communicate a sense of asoft fetishistic visual that may suggests- to a certain degree, erotica. But at the same time and from within social context, they are a plea towards confrontations of two contrasting ideals contained within a contemporary, masculine identity.