Huw Davies Gallery18 July - 17 August 2019

Australasian Beauty

Last year I had a meeting with a professor to discuss further study. I am told he is the pre-eminent ‘Asianist’ scholar. I am nervous and I find my body shifting and withering under his authoritative, white, male gaze. He tells me that to be a serious academic, I must shift and wither.

Five minutes into my introduction he interrupts me, 'Stop giggling like a schoolgirl.'

* * * * *

It has been twenty years since Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty was released in 1999. The film was applauded for its satire on egocentric individualism and the emptiness of middle-class American life. The protagonist, Lester Burnham, is dissatisfied with his corporate job and loveless marriage until he meets and begins to lust after his daughter’s school mate, Angela Hayes.

The Lolita-esque nymphet schoolgirl Angela is merely a plot device, a footnote, a human vessel for Lester’s desires. Through his fantasy of her, he is able to reconnect with his physicality and his sexuality and therefore his masculinity and autonomy. Lester’s obsession with Angela is celebrated both narratively and visually in the film sequences showing Angela surrounded by red rose petals. These sequences have become iconic and aestheticised.

Whilst Angela’s sexual confidence may be an assertion of her own sexuality and power, by the end of the film, when she reveals that she is not sexually experienced, Angela is portrayed as an innocent child. Lester then stops pursuing her and we are positioned to admire his restraint. This encounter centres Lester’s experiences, as a signal of his transformation and maturation and his, apparently, incredible self-control against Angela’s seduction. The cinematic trope of the nymphet privileges Lester. The power that Angela held over Lester was ultimately illusory. Her self-assurance is a façade and ultimately she needs Lester’s protection.

* * * * *

Australasian Beauty Andy Mullens

Image: Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 8 (film poster b) (detail), 2018-2019, inkjet print.

An exhibition of photomedia works investigating the fetishisation and infantilisation of Asian Women in the Anglosphere. Appropriating the 1999 film ‘American Beauty’ Mullens uses self-portraiture to subvert the Gaze upon the Other, and question who is looking at whom.

When I was 17 years old I wanted to go as blond-haired, blue-eyed Luna Lovegood to a Harry Potter-themed party. As the only Asian there, however, I was suddenly conscious of the length of my school skirt and the way the blouse tugged at my body. Five minutes into the party, scratching at my blonde wig, someone walks past snickering, 'Hey Cho Chang.'

* * * * *

Twenty years on, the film still enjoys its canonized status as middle-class white American audiences continue to identify with the ennui and malaise of the comfortable American male in midlife.

Twenty years on, Asian women continue to be relatively invisible on Hollywood screens (only 10% to be exact).1 And when they are visible, they are hyper-sexualised, fetishised and tokenised.

We are Angela Hayes.

We are never the central protagonist. Like Angela, there is no depth of character, we are shallow tropes, we are made for visual pleasure. We are denied the same intellectual, emotional and existential depths and complexities that Lester enjoys.

Lester’s lust for Angela is seen as a transgression and her role marks the disintegration of white American-middle class values around domesticity. When we are sexualised, it is normalised, sanitised, aestheticised and depoliticised because it is racialised.

The compounded male, white, colonised gaze dehumanises Asian women into fantasies and constructions. We have conventionally functioned as the heterosexual embodiment of idealised femininity. This long Orientalist legacy is what Anne Anlin Cheng describes as Ornamentalism:

'Culturally encrusted and ontologically implicated by representations, the yellow woman is persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality, simultaneously made and unmade by the aesthetic project. She denotes a person but connotes a style, a naming that promises but supplants skin and flesh.'2

Reclaiming agency over one’s body is not a novel concept but continues to be relevant and necessary in a world where Asian women exist as purely and inherently aesthetic objects.

* * * * *

Researching for my thesis on Asian feminisms, I find myself on an academic forum website. Prescribed readings include Helene Cixous, Simone De Beauvoir, Mary Wollstonecraft, and so forth. Frustrated at the lack of contextualised (Asiatic/yellow) feminisms, I scour the site. Five minutes in, I find a face like mine on the page.

In the margin, there is a smiling, airbrushed woman in red lipstick and a schoolgirl outfit. There are flashing words underneath:

'Hot, single, Asian women in your area.'

'Your Asian Beauty.'

Soo-Min Shim, July 2019

Soo-Min Shim is an arts writer based in Sydney. She has written for several Australian and international publications including Art & The Public Sphere, The Artling, Art Almanac, Runway Conversations, un Extended and Running Dog.

1 Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, 'It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top Grossing Films of 2018,' Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University, 2019, https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2018_Its_a_Mans_Celluloid_World_Report.pdf.

In the 100 highest grossing films of 2013, 3% of all female characters were Asian and another 3% were aliens or fantasy races. Hence, in 2013 American theatre audiences were just as likely to see an alien as they were an Asian woman.

Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, 'It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2013', Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University, 2014, https://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2013-Its-a-Mans-World-Report.docx.

2 Anne Anlin Cheng, "Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman," Critical Inquiry 44, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 415-446.

Andy Mullens | About

Andy Mullens is a multidisciplinary artist based in Canberra, Australia. Her practice explores the facets of identity through installation, photomedia, sculpture and video works. Mullens is interested in examining culture, language and gender. She draws attention to the intersection of the personal and political by using her experiences as a Vietnamese-Australian and woman as direct case studies in her work.

Mullens holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from the ANU School of Art & Design. She was the winner of the 2016 Yen Female Art Awards (NSW), and has also been a finalist in the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery National Works on Paper Awards (VIC), and the Contemporary Art Awards (QLD). She has been in several group exhibitions such as Anthropocene curated by Grace Partridge of Antidote (NSW), Sophia Cai’s Disobedient Daughters at Metro Arts (QLD) and Future Archaeology curated by Toby Chapman at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (NSW). In 2016 Mullens was the In Focus resident at PhotoAccess and in 2016 produced her solo exhibition Mother Tongue. Australasian Beauty is Mullens’ fourth solo exhibition.

Andy Mullens | Artist statement

Australasian Beauty is an exhibition of photomedia works investigating the fetishisation and infantilisation of Asian women in the Anglosphere. Appropriating the 1999 film ‘American Beauty’ Mullens uses the film as a mechanism to challenge the notions of the Gaze upon the Other through self-portraiture. She re-casts herself, an Asian-Australian, in the role of Angela Hayes: the young girl who becomes the Object of the main character’s desire. In this way she becomes both the subject and creator of the image, actively subverting the gaze and transforming the character dynamic from fantasy to power. This exhibition is part of a larger contemporary conversation about power dynamics in gender and racial relations. Recontextualising the film 20 years after its release, Mullens asks, who is looking at whom?

Image list

1 Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 1 (film poster a), 2019, inkjet print, 114.90 x 76.10cm, edition 1 of

6 + AP

$840

2. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 2 (2:15), 2019, inkjet print, 45.0 x 80.0cm, edition 1 of 6 + AP $410

3. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 3 (6:55), 2019, inkjet print, 45.0 x 80.0cm, edition 1 of 6 + AP $410

4. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 4 (19:53), 2018-2019, inkjet print, 45.0 x 80.0cm, edition 1 of 6 + AP $410

5. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 5 (37:24), 2019, inkjet print, 45.0 x 80.0cm, edition 1 of 6 + AP $410

6. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 6 (44.08), 2019, inkjet print, 45.0 x 80.0cm, edition 1 of 6 + AP $410

7. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 7 (1:52:12), 2019, inkjet print, 45.0 x 80.0cm, edition 1 of 6 + AP $410

8. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 8 (film poster b), 2018-2019, inkjet print, 114.90 x 76.10cm, edition 1

of 6 + AP

$840

9. Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 9 (16:23 - 17:10), 2019, single channel video, 00:01:16, edition 1 of 6 +

AP

$290

In Conversation: Artist and WriterJoin Andy Mullens and Sydney-based arts writer Soo-Min Shim for an engaging contemporary conversation exploring power

dynamics in gender and racial relations.

This is a free event and all are welcome, drinks and nibbles will be served.

When: 2pm on Saturday 10 August 2019.

Where: PhotoAccess Huw Davies Gallery.

Please do RSVP via our website www.photoaccess.org.au/events to let us know you are coming.

Thanks and Acknowledgment

Kon, Soo-Min, Tori, Nathan, Sophia, Georgie, Wayne, Lyn, Zac, Millan, Hannah, Robert and the PhotoAccess team

I would like to acknowledge that this exhibition is being held on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri

people, and pay my respect to elders: past, present and emerging.

Image: Andy Mullens, Australasian Beauty 1 (film poster a), 2019, inkjet print