“ 2020 “Revelation of Eve Clone”: Lin Pey-Chwen +Digital Art Lab, Tainan Art Museum, Tainan, Taiwan

Category

Exhibition

Year

2020

Institution

Tainan Art Museum, Tainan

Comment

Revelation of Eve Clone : Lin Pey-Chwen Digital Art Lab ExhibitionArtist ｜Pey-Chwen LinCurator ｜Ming TurnerPlace｜Gallery K – Gallery L, Tainan Art Museum Building 2Organizer｜ Tainan Art MuseumSpecial Thanks to B.B.ART, Yiiisu Co., Ltd., Cmie Design, Chin-Hsiang Hu, Sheng-Chieh WangPey-Chwen Lin began her “Eve Clone” series in 2006, introducing a sequence of artworks that convey the artist’s imagination and interpretation of the posthuman, and especially that of posthuman female bodies. This series conveys both femininity and religious symbolism. Although the creation of Lin’s works relies heavily on technology and digital techniques, she is actually being critical of the negative impact of technology on modern human society. Although the Eve Clone exemplifies the basic biological features of a female body, she is a cyborg, and is thus composed of both natural and artificial parts. Here, Eve is flawless and without body hair, presenting a utopian female body created by the artist, a body that is both real and fake, organic and inorganic. In “The Portrait of Eve Clone”, Lin has used 3D animated holograms to join Eve’s head with various images of beasts, to which she then added different minerals, colors and textures (gold, silver, copper, iron, and clay). Lin’s works are satirizing the hidden dangers that technology has brought to mankind, confronting the social constraints and confinements which have long been imposed on the female body.In the video installation, “Great Babylon” (2015), Eve Clone appears at the Empire State Building in New York City, where she looks over the human world, at their sins and their desires. In 2016, Lin created “Making of Eve Clone I”, which combined Eve Clone with Da Vinci’s male body sketches and manuscripts. She also replaced Da Vinci’s mirror image text with Bible passages from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. She deliberately retained the icons and logos from the 3D computer software, grids, and cameras, to create a unique texture that is both digital and hand-drawn. The intertwining juxtaposition and rotation of Eve Clone and Da Vinci’s drawing, Vitruvian Man, also creates an integrated image and a dialogue that is cross-temporal, cross-media, and cross-spatial, while further resonating with the concept of androgyny. In “Making of Eve Clone VP/1-6” and “Making of Eve Clone BP/1-6”, screenshots of artworks from “Making of Eve Clone I” were combined with biblical verses to express a sense of revelation. Lin further used biblical quotations in the form of a manifesto, and projected these words throughout the exhibition room, transforming the enormous visual tension into some kind of spiritual elevation. The Eve Clone in Lin’s artwork expresses a sense of anxiety and uncertainty that is intertwined between humans and non-humans. According to digital feminist scholar, Donna Haraway, this hybrid, made of a combination of biological and technological features, is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” The “Revelation of Eve Clone – Pey-Chwen Lin + Digital Art” exhibition showcases the most representative works from the Eve Clone series of recent years, including video installations, multimedia interactive art, holographic photography, and mixed-media works. Her works present insightful views and thoughts about the increasingly important contemporary cultural issues of gender, technology and art.