In June of this year, Wearing's first retrospective in North America, Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, is on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition includes more than 100 of the artist's A series of self-portraits created by Wei Ying during the epidemic are also on display.
Wearing spent his childhood in Birmingham, England. She remembered being praised by her art teacher for the masks she made when she was eleven or twelve, and at 17, Wearing joined the school's amateur drama group. During one performance, she wrapped her face in gauze, and when the mask caught the audience's attention, she experienced a strange freedom from anonymity. As a result, "mask" has become the theme of Wei Ying's life exploration, and it has also become an important clue for the outside world to understand the artist's creative path. While studying at Goldsmiths in London, Wearing became a member of the YBA (Young British Artists). During this period, Wearing began to take regular photos of her face, which became the predecessor of her "selfie series". In the selfie series, she recreates a series of family photos in which she wears lifelike masks of family members or herself when she was young, transcending identity, gender and generation, looking for fictional reality with precise detail, Wearing's work is not Simply watching but looking and spying, she masquerades as a family member, prompting reflections on our inherited roles, genetic traits, and inheritance.
In 2018, during the 100th anniversary of British women's suffrage celebrations, a new statue of a woman appeared in London's Parliament Square by suffragette Millicent Fawcett by Wearing, Fawcett's statue carries a banner that reads "Courage Calls To Courage Everywhere," which is both striking and reminiscent of the artist's work (Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say, 1992-1993). Thirty years ago, Wearing stopped passersby on a busy south London Street to write down their thoughts, including young men in suits and ties, who proudly held up a sign that read, "I am desperate."; there were also teenage girls who smiled playfully and held up the “I HATE THE WORLD!!” sign. Wearing has captured all kinds of honesty and vulnerable "confessions", and even she herself was surprised: those broken hearts were caught under the coercion of a strong "control", the invisible masks the dislocations, contradictions, and dramatic tensions between the public and private self are revealed. The work is also reminiscent of today's online social media, where people are willing to share their inner feelings with strangers, as Wearing discovered in the early 1990s. Wearing's influence can be seen everywhere in contemporary pop culture and social media, and "holding a sign" has become a form of "self-expression" in today's popular culture.
Wearing’s early works also reveal subjective fluidity, such as Me: me (1992), which foretold today’s social media age of selfies and narcissism, which makes us subconsciously question “masks”. "Social Implications. Playwright Leo Butler, who worked with Wearing, once said: "Gillian holds up a mirror to humanity, to each of us, and tries to tell us who we really are."
Me as Meret Oppenheim (2019) is a photograph in the Spiritual Family series. In this series, Wearing "recreates" the iconic image of the legendary artist who has influenced her. But Me as Merret Oppenheim is different from the rest of the series. This exploration is not based on existing portrait photography, but constructs a fantasy scene, which shows Wearing and Swiss surrealist Meret Oppenheim, photographer Man. An imaginary encounter by Man Ray.
In the 1930s, shortly after the introduction of the two by Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray used Oppenheim as his model for a number of shoots, most notably in the group "The Implicit". Erotique voilée (1933), Oppenheim stands behind a giant printing-press flywheel, her hands and forearms covered in ink. But in reality, Man Ray never took a picture of Oppenheim sitting in front of a mirror, but the peculiar moment was created by Wearing, in which her face, arms and chest are Broken into interesting triangular pieces, Wearing becomes her adored, imitated and temporarily incarnated Oppenheim. It took her a long time to observe multiple reflections of herself masquerading as someone else, and it took her eight hours to take this photo, "At the end of the day, when I see my face, it's for me Kind of unfamiliar."
Some of the images Wearing creates reflect an existential gaze and implicit anxiety. When Wearing wears the mask of Robert Mapplethorpe's face to create, Wearing is conscious by that time it was the last portrait he took of himself, and she imagined herself as Mapplethorpe, and at the same time she would try to detach herself as much as possible, restore Mapplethorpe's vision, and try to make him the protagonist of the picture, but could Mapplethorpe at the time be freed from the shadow of death? Will he wear his mask? At that moment, Wearing seemed to get a unique opportunity for self-transformation, she realized that when she put on such a convincing disguise, she had been seen as a completely different person, and her character was inevitable. The land has changed, because her knowledge of this person has penetrated invisibly, and a wonderful transformation has taken place. At the same time, the mask has become a bridge, allowing Wearing to experience a unique sense of the other.
Wearing is obsessed with masks. The silicone masks used in his works usually take three to four months to make. The two holes for the eyes of the mask can reveal the artist's eyes. Wearing once said: "I want the space between the skin and the mask, so you can see that the mask is a real thing, which makes it more mysterious... It's important to show the skills, it makes you see more, and attracts you with its unknownness." It is in this gap, in the exposure of two overlapping identities, that the illusion of realism is suddenly interrupted. Wearing's masks often appear in a magical and disturbing way. She hides herself and adopts other people's identities, which has become a recurring theme in her creations. Masks are both props and daily routine performance metaphors for human individuals. Wearing seems to have plunged into the infinitely extending cave of identity and inner self. Starting from the visual language, she evokes a kind of philosophical meditation on gender, identity and role through the mask of disguise.
Article Source:艺术与设计
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