Wenqi Zou
Sensing, Touching and Chronograph： Exploring the dialogic aesthetics of disease, translating women's experiences of chronic illness
Summary
In the East Asian social context, there are still inequalities and neglect in the medical framework when it comes to women's reproductive health and chronic disease. Based on my own experience of chronic illness, my research focuses on how the perception and temporality of chronic diseases are bound by specific social contexts. My aim is to provide women diagnosed with endometriosis with more possibilities to perceive the disease, to broaden the way to reclaim agency, to reduce the level of anxiety and fatigue caused by the disease. This research attempts to reconstruct the practice of individual narratives, so as to expand and change the established recording patterns and representations of the perception of the body, the sensory language and cyclic time experience for chronic patients. Through an innovative disease narrative structure, my research focuses on the physical manifestations of pain perception and temporality. Using multi-dimensional records, I explore the boundaries of somatosensory language, and states beyond the boundaries of subjective cognition. I hope that my practical experience can help women have a stronger voice, and to bring this poetic, abstract and powerful artistic language to the medical dialogue.
My practice engages in the awareness and discussion of chronic illness by extending the medium in multiple dimensions. It includes recording pain conditions in the form of drawings, perceiving the body's sense of touch in the form of performance, and simulating the body's multi-sensory state by shaping unique material materials in the form of 3D sculpture. I believe that by expanding the multi-media approach of my art practice and engaging the multiple senses of the audience, I can promote more awareness and discussion about women's chronic illnesses. This research expands new ways of experiencing illness, builds my strength from the peripheral frame of lived experience, turns practice into resistance, and detaches and liberates the body from the gaze with cognitive biases against chronic disease. It constructs and explores a model of multidimensional translation of bodily experience, activating and imagining more effective strategies for external export, making it possible for artists and humanities researchers to change the understanding of illness from within institutions and in the field of health care.
Keywords: Chronic Illness, Embodiment, Female, Cycle time, Perception, Material, Touch
Additional info
Wenqi Zou (b.1999) is an intermedia artist and researcher .She graduated from MRes Fine Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Her art practice establishes a coordinate system with "image-body-medium" as the axis, to expand the perception of images and related practices and their entanglement with each other. Her currently humanistic studies focus on the politics of female identity and public health care. It attempts to reconstruct the practice of individual narratives, so as to expand and change the established recording patterns and representations of the perception of the body, the sensory language and cyclic time experience for female chronic patients.
- Whisper, Watercolor on paper, 21cm×29.7cm, Installation View, 2022
In this project, I think about how to establish a working state and practice method that can reconcile with the disease, and to develop the strategy of dialogue with nursing institutions and medical examinations.Through the practice of art, one can make one's body a tool for understanding pain and a place of knowledge.
Since the 1970s, the narrative of medical anthropology has shifted to further emphasize the insider perspective of the patient and the deep description of the pain, while the new historiography has regarded the patient as a neglected underclass.Therefore, patient writing has been used to reflect on the social structure of modern medical knowledge.
However, in practice, I realised the vagueness and limitation of the description of pain in words. The linearity and abstraction of adjectives, had made it difficult for me as a recorder to understand and compare when viewing the calendar; at the same time, the verbal description of pain was simplified to comparisons and metaphors, so that the patients see themselves only as an objective physical fact. Pain is often perceived as externalised in such description, as if it were an external weapon that enters the body. This recording method undoubtedly weakens my acceptance of the chronic disease, and pain is regarded as a kind of ‘intruding object’.
I started with the sensory painting to express my pain staute.It became my daily practice while at the same time becoming an entry point for me to explore new ways of expressing disease languages.I adopted a phenomenology of perception among other interdisciplinary methodologies as the main theoretical analysis framework during this initial practice. Through sensory analysis, I realised that practice has the potential to become a phenomenological method, and it might even become the experience of investigating diseases itself.
- The Pendulum Wandering Around,Ceramic, Wooden Boards Silicone, 40cm×65cm, Installation View, 202
After two-dimensional exploration and practice,I want to explore the three-dimensional and four- dimensional fields with this communication pathway, focusing on the phenomenology of haptics and the expression of cyclical time in the sensory experience. I want to establish a multi-dimensional, visible and touchable perceptual communication mediator, to try to understand the elasticity and plasticity between the body and tactile memory, and find ways to continue to support its internal healing mechanisms.
I divide the tactile experience in my creation into intrinsic touch and extrinsic touch. Sensing represents the inner sense of touch, which comes from the perception brought to me by the disease itself, as an input of information. Touching, on the other hand, is the external sense of touch. I simulate this sensory intention through the production of materials as an outlet for information.Extrinsic touching originates from an extrinsic output and translation of my sense.Touch is one of the most important methods I use to construct and visualise imagery of bodily disease perception. I think the subject of touch is not only human, but also can be between matter and matter. The visual model embodied by the touch, and the squeezing between such matter can better help the audience to feel and fantasise the discomfort of endomorphism.
I have been trying to make images and sculptures that are full of tactile descriptions and material textures that stand out, so that the viewer's tactile imagination can strongly reproduce my perceptual experience, even if they do not have a direct physical experience.
The intrinsic sensation of touch (sensing) stems from my understanding of this disease experience as the touch of blood on my endometrium.The endometrium located under your abdomen, cannot be reached by sensation, but surely it can be reached by the imagination.The discomfort caused by endometriosis during ovulation and menstruation is multidirectional and clear to any patient, but this pain cannot be tested or judged visually.According to the survey, most patients with endometriosis or pelvic inflammatory disease usually experience discomfort from tingling, swelling, and swelling of the blood vessels in the fallopian tubes and uterus.The pain is vague, constant, and unrelenting; it makes it seem as if a hard piece of material is constantly expanding inward in the uterus. As Jaffa Frank argues, endometriosis makes the blood in the uterus destructive; the mythical Medusa can be seen as the prototype of endometriosis because of its ability to turn the female reproductive organ (the biological centre of female creativity) into stone.
Through my gesture as a female chronic patient, I knead organic materials with traces of rhizome forms, which is more touchable and exclusionar. By shaping the undifferentiated traces of the body and the texture of the clay, the endometrium, which is not in the right place, and the pelvic figure, which is "absent", show my new imagination of the internal tissue path.Clay and skin, ceramic and tissue, I am deeply fascinated by this homogeneity and homology that exists between the material and body.
- Re-tracing Cycle time,Moving Image, Screenshot, 4’20’’, 2022, Sound designed by Lapis
This work based on the reflction of 'cycle time'.The content of the film recreates how women feel and reproduce their temporal patterns, and re-express the concept of temporality through pill dispensers, Ishango Bones and knitted objects.It is a demonstration of how women are more adept at using the tools at their disposal to perceive the world and more sensitive to changes in time.These objects that are not only intimate but also fragile and sacred: they control, mitigate, alter, hide and reveal the patterns of time of the groups of women who depend on them every day. Through re-entering history — and tracing the clues and intertwined events and relationships associated with it — we can re-envision the present and even the future.
