This interview was originally published in sinθ #24 “EMBER 炎”. Get it now on BLURB.
One page of London-based artist Yvonne Feng’s 2021 artist’s book, Notebook (Fragments), shows an ink drawing of four rows of hard plastic seats, the kind we see in waiting rooms across the world. It’s ironic that these mass-produced chairs are used by people who must wait, because they seem designed to be uncomfortable, and are usually so low that to sit in them feels infantilizing. In Feng’s drawing, they’re isolated on a blank page, and look small yet vaguely threatening. Flip the page, and on the other side is another ink drawing, this time more abstract: a grid of black diamonds separated by thin white lines. It takes a moment for us to realize that this is a chain-link fence depicted from up close, with nothing to see on the other side: no buildings, no landscape, just darkness. Accompanying text asks us to imagine a world without shadows and therefore without light. Which world is more cruel? Ours, or that one?
Notebook (Fragments), published by Hong Kong-based independent art press Sulla Fulla in a print run of 100, is a collection of drawings and short texts made in response to Feng’s mother’s incarceration. In 2014, Feng, who was in the U.K. at the time, received a call from her mother in Guangdong province, China, informing Feng that she was at the police station and would be imprisoned that night. Feng overheard the following exchange between her mother and a policeman asking her to remove her jewelry —
“Oh, I can’t take my jade bracelet off. I have tried with soap. I have worn it for more than 30 years. It grew on my wrist.”
“In that case, we have to saw it off.”
— before the call abruptly ended.
What followed was five years of disjointed communication, with Feng sending letters and going on visits knowing that every word and every move was under surveillance. The violence of incarceration struck Feng to the core and she needed ways to process and channel her emotions, but she also knew that her experience was second-hand and dramatically different to that of her mother’s. How could her art help her to approach this topic — if it could at all?
Feng began her practice-led PhD at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Arts in 2014, shortly after her mother was imprisoned, and she concluded her studies in 2019, the year of her mother’s release. Her thesis, Tracing the Unspeakable: Painting as Embodied Seeing, built on Feng’s previous explorations of subjectivity and the marginalized body while asking questions about the limits and possibilities of painting as a medium when confronting traumatic histories. The thesis itself was relatively academic in tone, citing Albert Camus, Jacques Lacan, and Susan Sontag, but the appendix included more diaristic jottings and drawings — it’s the appendix that eventually grew into Notebook (Fragments).
Feng collaborated with Sulla Fuffa’s founder, Eunice Tsang, to design the printed book, keeping in mind the uniquely interactive format of a book. For instance, on one page, they stuck an empty envelope with text printed on it that described a handwritten, heartfelt letter Feng tried to mail from the UK, but that her mother was never allowed to receive. “I was thinking about how to tell a story visually, and also how to tell the story through a fragmented way: speaking in the gap between image and text,” Feng tells me as we flip through the book together during my visit to her home studio in July.
Feng shows me the only drawing with color in the book: a silhouette engulfed in a yellow flame three times its size, its hands spread as if holding something invisible. She tells me she’d been thinking about photographs of self-immolation and of Vietnam War napalm bombings, as well as more recent protest imagery. “History repeats itself,” she says. “The fate of the individual is always to turn into ashes, in this kind of event.” It’s a sensitive enough picture that Feng initially worried the book’s printer, located in the mainland, might object to it — but they didn’t. “It’s quite interesting, playing with that ambiguity,” Feng muses.
Another zone of ambiguity lies in Feng’s use of language: all text is in English, even when transcribing her mother’s phone call. This is partly because of the project’s academic origins: Feng has lived in the UK since she was 16, she did her BFA and PhD at the Slade, and her MFA at London’s Royal College of Art, so English is the language in which she makes art. On another level, though, Feng finds it important to draw a boundary between autobiographical writing and her actual self. The voice she employs in this project is “an artistic voice, a performative voice, and also a fictional voice,” she says. Take the word mother: when Feng had first begun making notes, it had been out of a desperate need to remember what was happening, so she’d used the most natural wording: my mother. But as her project developed, she dropped my, because the concept “became a mother in absence that I was in dialogue with,” Feng explains. Next, this figure of the absent mother served as Feng’s mirror image, helping her search for herself: what did she want to say? Finally, mother also became motherland, representing, at once, Feng’s home, her mother’s physical location, and the prison system that trapped them.
Part of the reason why Feng gradually abstracted the experience concerns the fundamental ethics of non-fiction work. Feng recalls one of her PhD tutors reminding Feng to consider research ethics, which necessarily included mining Feng’s own trauma: “You’re constantly exposing yourself.” Not only within the art itself, but also in that doctoral study includes doing public presentations. Had Feng stopped to think about the impact this would have on herself? By the time she reached her second year, she was exhausted, she says. “I found myself quite stuck. The only visual I had was that prison visit, and there’s nothing to see beyond. So after a while, I felt like, ‘What is there for me to paint?’” She’d originally conceived of the violence as being manifested in violent events, and so she’d painted “quite ridiculous images, like a gun pointing at vulnerable figures and stuff like that,” but she eventually realized that violence’s core was in absence and in the unspeakable.
Such an idea becomes clearest when Feng recounts what it was like after her mother came out of prison. Feng spent years thinking philosophically about the concept of prisons, especially in the context of Michel Foucault and COVID lockdowns in their various forms. “Does this kind of captivity exist even in a prison with no walls? It’s kind of the idea of the docile body: how the body learns to self-govern,” Feng says. “If that is the concept… that’s the ultimate goal of prison.”
Feng continues by describing the system in which her mother was incarcerated, which she supposes is inspired by Soviet models of re-education through labor. “Unless they’re really unwell, all the prisoners have to be given targets and points. You have to finish this amount of factory work to get points. Then, they have another financial system where a family member has to deposit money for them to buy stuff within the prison,” she says. But the prisoner’s wages don’t translate fairly to the goods’ prices. “It’s ridiculously unequal, basically. It’s just exploiting cheap labor.”
Yet Feng’s mother’s perspective differs drastically. In the 1960s and 70s, Feng’s mother dropped out of school to join the Down to the Countryside Movement, like everyone in her generation. Similarly, she rationalizes her recent incarceration as having been, on some level, inevitable; a casualty of broader political forces over which she has no control. “As an individual, it’s mental and physical torture, but at the same time, on the grand scale, she thinks that, with her childhood experience… She’s a part of this history of the Chinese progression,” Feng reflects. “In my conversations with her, I found myself in this opposing binary position: her defending the system and the state, and me challenging those types of concepts.” Feng relates this to a 2017 short story by the Chinese writer and artist Hu Fang, entitled ‘囚禁的慰藉’ or ‘The Comfort of Captivity’ (Feng’s translation), where an architect receives a commission to design a prison and must reconcile the knowledge that he is acting as an arm of the state with his own beliefs about the humane or effective reform of criminals. Hu’s story made Feng wonder what states have to gain from fostering the bodily self-policing of their own citizens.
This is a question Feng is elaborating on in her more recent work, a project called ‘Docile Bodies’. How do institutional structures act to create or control subjects, and how do subjects react? “One of the difficulties I’ve always found is: research and painting, it’s sometimes two different types of language,” Feng says. “In my current work, I set myself a set of structures and rules. But then, thinking about my mark-making and my body: ‘Do I obey? Do I succumb to this structure? Or do I liberate myself from it?’” What interests her is not just how an incarceration system operates, but how it becomes legitimate.
To that end, one of the new paintings in her studio is In Circles (2021), an enormous canvas depicting seven identical naked figures kneeling on a gray floor covered in neat red marks, seemingly scrubbing it with soapy rags. The figures are arranged in a circle, each person’s head facing the ass of the person in front of them. The marks they’re erasing (or polishing?) resembles a blueprint diagram, full of straight lines that seem to delineate cramped spaces — a major motif in Feng’s current work.
It’s taken a while for Feng to gain momentum on ‘Docile Bodies’, not only because the pandemic began right around the time she graduated but because she needed to find and develop a new language for her art. “I don’t want myself to be framed, as an artist, to be limited to this narrative. ‘Okay, you’re Chinese, your mom is in prison. You have to make Chinese political art.’ Like, why?” One major issue is that Notebook (Fragments) and its associated works were feelings-driven. “I can’t just have those feelings forever,” Feng says. “Does that mean that I won’t be able to make the same kind of powerful work? Then I don’t want to be like that.” She is currently exploring the concept of ‘Docile Bodies’ through making multiple series of work simultaneously, and is hoping to present them as a coherent body.
In addition to thematic, conceptual, and stylistic puzzles, Feng has to balance her own practice with her teaching work at Camberwell College of Arts and the University of Brighton, the latter job to which she has to commute. Teaching takes up time, but it also lets her be part of a conversation, which complements the more isolated act of painting. “For me, painting is not something that can be taught, but I think it can be learned,” Feng says. “I see my job as to facilitate that learning, and create a safe space for discussion, for experimentation.” She works with students for a while before drawing out some common themes in their discussions and encouraging them to push it further.
Interestingly, recent discourse among painters has returned to the possibilities of painting as a language to express ideas, in contrast to modernist self-conscious meta-discussions of painting as a medium for itself. Feng cites the Danish painter Tal R, who differentiated between the personal and the private, especially in pedagogical environments. “When a student comes to say, ‘Oh, I have this really dramatic thing, this thing happened to me and I feel so emotional.’ Often, a student in that sort of emotional state… when they try to make the work about those private things, in the end, it always turns into some sort of cliché. But [Tal R] would say: Once those types of events, or feelings, are internalized, then it becomes personal in the work. Like, one could paint a pot of flowers, but still contain those personal things.” Similarly, Feng sees the process of finalizing and displaying artwork as something that turns private feelings into personal narratives. Such work “becomes an image that is kind of external to me… that I can present to the public,” she says.
Feng mentions that, at the London book launch for Notebook (Fragments) in June, a Hong Kong journalist brought up the Scar Art of the Chinese post-Cultural Revolution generation and asked whether Feng’s own work was a repetition of that history. “I thought it was a really good question, and it made me think a lot afterwards,” Feng says. But art responding to trauma isn’t made only by Chinese people, but is arguably a universal, transhistorical theme. Feng hadn’t made a connection between her work and Scar Art until then, but it occurred to her to think about what she was doing as part of a lineage; that this may be a fruitful way to conceive of her position as an artist.
