Yushi Li
The Drifting Gaze: Sexuality and Spectatorship in the Internet Age
Summary
How can contemporary photographic portraiture be used to question the staging of desire and the power relationship inherent in the gendered gaze in the Internet age? When I photograph a man, there is invariably not only a scenario in my mind, but a feeling or fantasy of this. In other words, it is in many respects a fusion of the psychic realm and the apparatus of visual representation. What happens when a woman looks at a man with desire? Does she take the position of a male and imitate the way how a man gazes at a woman? Do men and women simply reverse their gender roles and perpetuate the same active-passive relationship inherent in the gaze? Is there any other kind of gazes that is outside of this existing binary discourse of the looking subject and the looked-at object? If the dichotomy of the looking subject and the looked-at object has been conventionally and broadly embedded in the equation between men with activity and women with passivity, to what extent does the accessibility and ubiquity of images nowadays blur the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, and change the idea of the gaze fundamentally?
Additional info
The thesis is a reflection on the idea of the gaze and scopophilia (pleasure in looking). My analytical tool is psychoanalytic theory as deployed by theorists of the image. Using psychoanalysis as my main theoretical framework, I explore the question of the gaze in relation to gender and sexuality through theoretical research of psychoanalytical and philosophical theories, analyses of my own and other visual artists’ work and accounts of my own dreams.
In my photographic work, I use photography as both an observing tool for the investigation of male representations as an erotic subject and also a screen for projections of my fantasies to make my own portrayal of the body of desire by reflecting on the representations of the female body and the staging of eroticism in classical paintings in art history. Apart from that, I use the Internet as my platform to construct erotic scenarios and create visual pleasures, in which the power structure inherent in the gaze is deconstructed and examined. Through both my theoretical research and practice, I aim to rethink the gaze and scopophilia within the virtual space of the Internet.
I Hope You Like What You Have Seen
Breath in, Breathe out, 2019
Bath, 2020
In my moving image work, I try to play with this assumed power relationship of the active male looking subject and the passive female looked-at object by creating a more open and fluid spectatorial space via the Internet. In the project, I Hope You Like What You Have Seen, I asked men to perform naked different mundane domestic activities conventionally associated with the feminine and the maternal for me to watch. Their desire to be looked at opens up the complex relationship between the voyeur and the exhibitionist.
In contrast to these men’s total visibility – their fully naked bodies, I refuse to show myself neither in person nor via the webcam, leaving just a black rectangle at the right top side of the screen. In a sense, I am like the digital eye, not a woman, nor a man, that is constantly looking at us from all sides in the current image world. Even though I try to control these men by directing what they do and how they do it through my text or voice messages, the intangibility within the virtual space of the Internet, and the actual physical distance between me and those men highlights the impossibility of sustaining this fantasy of a controlling gaze.
For instance, in the video Breathe In, Breathe Out, the man started touching his penis at some point without my direction while he was lying on the bed, breathing in and out according to the typed instructions I sent him through Skype. His desultory masturbation seemed to aim at pleasing me and perhaps also at intimidating me, asserting that he could gaze back at me without seeing me. In the absence of his actual look upon me, his penis had become the thing that gazed at me.
Through both looking back at old paintings and looking directly via the webcam, I create mise en scènes of erotic desire. The use of the internet creates a particular structural uncertainty: in the intangible space of the Internet I am a disembodied eye; my identity, my existence even, is always uncertain. My gaze is that of the invisible voyeur in a peep show or the guard in the panopticon prison. But it can also be the maternal gaze upon the child who plays alone secure in the presence of the mother out of sight.
Paintings, Dreams and Love
The Feast, inside, 2020
The Veil, 2020
The Death of Actaeon, 2019
In this project, my desire, dreams and love for the desired body are illustrated in a photographic form. By looking at certain classical paintings, I try to reflect on those representations of the female body and staging of desire and eroticism in art history to make my own portrayal of the body of desire. In the resulting photographs, I take the more dominant and powerful role in the scene, regardless of its sex. By taking an active rather than passive role in my work, instead of simply reversing the gender roles, I try to intervene within existing representations of erotic desire to question the dichotomy of active men and passive women that has been broadly embedded in art history.
