1918ARTspace is pleased to present ”惑! Obscure Desire”, a group exhibition of paintings and photography by Chinese and foreign contemporary artists, WU JiFeng, XU GuoFeng & KANG Kai, ZHANG Yong, Stephen J. Shanabrook & Veronika Georgieva, whose compelling seductive works depict the mystery and perversity of human eternal desire. Influenced by Surrealism, the first art movement from the 1920’s to openly address topics of love, desire and sexuality, it revolutionalized the human experience personally, culturally, socially and politically, freeing the mind from all superficial rationality and restrictive customs and structures.

Surrealists are obsessed with sex and desire, exploring the Freudian notion of the conscious and hidden unconscious, diving into the darkness of mind and mystery of dreams, tormented with inner-struggle and contradictions from reality, thus driving their imagination to insanity. In Luis Bunuel’s surreal film “That Obscure Object of Desire”, the complexity of the ambiguous female protagonist, Conchita, is portrayed by 2 women, who resists being reduced to an “object of desire”. She declares “I don’t belong to anyone! I belong to myself!” This unattainable, enigmatic and ambiguous act of desire is the central theme, the great force behind this exhibition.

“One must do violence to the object of one's desire, When it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.” Marquis de Sade What is desire? The surrealist leader Andre Breton described desire as the "only master that man must recognize". The need to define desire in this sexual context, takes us into the dark continent of female sexuality. Even with the rise of feminism, female sexuality continues to be experienced as dangerous and erotic, often as a subject of male sexual fantasies and excessively idealized. Influenced by Freud (first theorist of desire and psychoanalysis), the surrealists saw sexual desire as a path to self-knowledge--"a theatre of provocations and prohibitions in which life's most profound urges confront one another". WU Jifeng’s paintings explore sensual pleasure through women in provocative poses. One feels the sexual tension in ZHANG Yong’s dreamscape of women swimming with strange and beautiful creatures. The conceptual photography of XU Guofeng and KANG Kai plays with the seductive and fantasy drama behind the women in Chinese opera style costume and make up. The “paper surgery” photography by Stephen J Shanabrook & Veronika Georgieva is a meditation on Andre Breton’s idea that “Beauty will be convulsive or not at all”, thus best sums up Salvador Dali’s desire, “In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive".

Curator
Kartini Tanoto