Hangnail
2024
Single-channel video with sound, HD
6’53”
you dress me up series
2023-onging
Anime magical girl merch-toys, vintage candle holder, hot-process soap, faux pearls, beads, artificial hair, loose felt, mini ribbon rose
Platter series
2024
Stainless steel trays, hot-process soap, fragrance
Reveal
2024
Hot-process soap, marble balls
Crybaby
2024
Hot-process soap, fragrance
All works are part of the solo exhibition Hangnail.
A hangnail—a jagged piece of skin around the side of a fingernail—can be negligible or perplexing and even throbbing when one rips it off. The pain of pulling a hangnail may seem rather insignificant, but the unsettling, haunting annoyance of a hangnail that never truly goes away troubles people. The direct translation of hangnail into Chinese would be “inverse pulling”. This (mis)translation can perhaps offer a window to imagine the idea of “inverse pulling” as a radical force going against the norm, the order, and the system of power from feminist and queer perspectives.
This year’s M.F.A. Graduation Exhibition, titled Hangnail, presents Hou Lam Tsui’s new works that encompass sculpture, installation, and moving-image. Tsui is interested in the often rigid media representation of the feminine, and how consumer desires shape affects, the way we perceive love and even identities. This exhibition is shaped to be an incredibly intimate, anachronistic space filled with small sculptures and a moving image piece that appears both familiar and strange to the audience.
Central to numerous sculptural works in the exhibition is the use of soap, alongside found magical girl toys, vintage household objects, artificial hair, and ornaments perceived stereotypically feminine. Soap has been a recurring material in Tsui’s practice—she is fascinated by its precarity, fragility as well as everyday banality. Soap symbolises society’s obsessive pursuit of cleanliness and the association of cleanliness, and even purity, with women. Tsui’s sculptures delve into the concept of the “monstrous feminine” and shed light on the idea of abject by juxtaposing misshapen soap and out-of-place hair as seen in her ongoing series you dress me up. Another work Crybaby features teardrops in cast soap which the artist rethinks the radicalness of tears and the imagery portraying the sad girl in media that often ends up fetishising and deprecating feminine sorrow.
Premiered at this graduation exhibition, is the latest moving-image work Hangnail which spans film photographs, scanned images of pages and book covers, 3D animation, and 2D animation. The work critically explores the fetishisation and romanticisation of feminine death, delving deep into the complex legacy of fictional heroines across various art forms and within the digital realm. It exposes the pervasive occurrence of the deaths of young girls and rethinks the unrealistic portrayals perpetuated by late male literary and artistic figures. The artist examines society’s fixation on the concept of “reality” and its perception of “truths” and how the dominant systems of power have historically exploited the concept of “fictionality” to fulfil fantasies and fetishisations.