If you find ideas of white standards for Asian beauty a controversial one, then London-based Korean multimedia artist Dorothy Yoon’s latest show 13 of Blondes has a series of exhibits portraying Asian women as women with blonde hair and blue eyes. That should piss you off provoke you on an intellectual and artist level.
artreview.com recently interviewed the artist on some of the thought processes behind her latest work:
Headed by Venus in the group, there are five categories of blondes, such as iconic blonde, historical royalties, fictional manga, and those who upgraded their social statuses through men. There is a mixture of Western and Eastern traditional allegories, symbolisms and metaphors. The work is the result of my light-hearted expression of ‘West East Crash’.
“West East Crash,” indeed. Efren had this to say about Yoon’s pieces:
Well, it’s definitely looking at it from an Asian perspective rather than an Asian American perspective, but it’s interesting to note that she deliberately looks in realms like manga, where the images are white in appearance, but the characters are always assumed to be Japanese in character and that strange cultural disconnect — which is one of the reasons why I have a hard time reading some manga. I’ve always wondered why there’s never really been any sort of criticism or critique about that — especially since Japan is one of the few Asian countries that didn’t officially go through any sort of colonization and yet carries a lot of the same cultural baggage about “white beauty” that us folk from colonized countries do.
I love her talking about pink (or white?) as being artificial and not being grounded in her reality, and I think that’s what the essence of her art show’s about.
