IMAGES OF WOMEN exhibition artist | Amy Meng
My practice stems from a fascination with kawaii culture (the culture of cuteness prevalent in East Asia), psychoanalysis and craft. These interests act as a backdrop for my investigation into the ambivalent nature of issues such as infantilization, fetish, domesticity, etc., and their impact on the individual and collective mind.
Drawing influences from manga and anime, I employ narrative devices as a means to materialize the elusiveness and volatility of our emotions and psyche. Fabricated personas play the role of surrogates, embodying those who are often wandering along the periphery of a phallocentric social fabric. These simulacra oscillate between the sweet and the perverse, the infantile and the adult, in a world where reality and fantasy, the imaginary and the symbolic all become increasingly superimposed.
I also incorporate hobby craft and household materials into my work which usually require repetitive labor. This facilitates my effort to subvert the notion that the home is a ‘safe haven’, and at the same time allows me to re-examine and problematize domestic stereotypes, namely the house wife and the otaku (an agoraphobic individual who shuns social interaction and is usually obsessed with video games and/or anime).
I seek to portray the real lived experiences of domestic life, where comfort and conflict, intimacy and transgression are messily intertwined. Thus home, in an idiosyncratic sense, transforms into an incubator for intensities and excesses, a battleground for ‘I’ and ‘not I’. Instead of constructing concrete, linear narratives, I strive to destabilize and obscure the binaries and myths dominant in current society, creating works which are simultaneously abject and humorous, naïve and libidinal.
Amy Meng is a fiber-based interdisciplinary artist living and working on Gadigal land, Australia. She holds a Bachelor in Architectural Studies from the University of New South Wales, and an MFA from the Fiber department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Australia, and featured in several publications, including Curious Magazine and OyeDrum.
