Blues for Wei | Steven Harris

A response to Wei Li’s Vessels

While Wei Li’s principal medium is painting, she has been making digital images recently, especially since having children.  Wei has worked digitally before, creating virtual environments for the gaming industry.  Wanting to develop an alternative to that more deliberate and commercial approach to image-making, she turned to making unplanned, intuitive paintings that drew on automatic practices in surrealist art and writing.  Her work was shortlisted for the 2017 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and has been shown in other venues.  The outcomes of these abstract paintings were not foreseen, although they suggest interiority and bodily organs in particular – they function metaphorically as inscapes, in Matta’s sense of the term.

Wei has returned to digital image-making in the works being showcased by Latitude, within a thought process that in this case evokes the surrealist object, whose most familiar example is Meret Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner en fourrure of 1936.  The surrealist object was a three-dimensional application of the collage process, thought of by surrealists like Oppenheim as an erotic coming together of distant realities.  Wei is doing something similar with her digital objects, which are consumer items – and mostly vessels of some kind – to which high-resolution human skin has been applied to the parts of their surfaces not covered by labels.  This anthropomorphizes them into uncanny human subjects that are also objects. 

The work of imagination involved can be related to Karl Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, by means of which objects come to have a human-like presence; they beckon to us, promising a fulfillment they cannot actually offer. This mystification is achieved through the processes of marketing and exchange, through which knowledge of how an article was manufactured, the conditions in which it was made, and those who made it are effaced, in favour of an object that appears to have arrived immaculately at a store or on a shopping site.  Although art is often made by an individual whose process remains visible in the final work, it can also be understood in this way, to the extent that it is an intentional object that appears to have a life of its own.

Wei approached this idea indirectly, through her understanding of the objectification of the female body in patriarchal society, by which female human subjects are transformed into objects by a male gaze.  Through a dialectical inversion of this situation, she made the object a subject, complete with pores, hairs, and pigmentation.  The digital objects we see remain pristine due to their virtuality, as in a shopping catalogue, offering the promise of the commodity object in an uncanny and I would say poetic way.  One means through which art can resist its own commodification is through its reflection on this status, which we see here pursued in an intuitive way to its (il)logical conclusion.  The objects take on a subject-like character in an immanent critique of the commodity-form of any object or service that is subject to exchange.  The surrealist object took on a fetishistic form to challenge the mundane nature of commodity objects in market society, and this, I think, is what Wei is accomplishing here as well, through the anthropomorphization of objects that she uses in her daily life.  While this is most evident in the sippy cup or the Minion figure, it informs every one of her virtual objects, which are funny and alarming, and which bring us painfully close to the truth of our current predicament of overconsumption.  

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