lunar voluptuary (1) pictorially conflates intimate male and female form in an attempt at resisting sexual hierarchy. It is my effort at pointing the viewers—through the use of digitalia—towards a visual poetics of becoming androgynously circular (both solar and telluric). This, of course, necessitates a re-commitment to our transfiguring imaginations, a creative transfiguration which the sublime virtual abyss facilitates.
To accomplish this objective, lunar voluptuary makes use of what Gilles Deleuze has called “Pornology”(2). Of crucial interest to lunar voluptuary is the origin of the hermaphroditic androgyny image. This hybrid image first appears in Ovid’s classic text Metamorphoses—and perhaps this emergence is well worth recounting here. The hermaphrodite initially occurs in Western culture as a son of Hermes and Aphrodite named Hermaphroditus. As the tale of Hermaphroditus suggests, lunar voluptuary is concerned with androgynist eroticism coupled to virtuality (3). It aims to depict an imagined chaos where new forms of sexual order arise such that any form of order is only temporary and provisional. The point of lunar voluptuary is the construction of an imaginative mental space where all sexual signs are subject to boundless symiosis—which is to say that they are translatable into other signs. Here, of course, it is possible to find resonance and affinities between sexual opposites.
This endeavor is socially beneficial in that the patriarchal construction of woman as Other and the female body as object is deeply rooted in the supposed duality (opposites) of the two sexes. Most feminist theory questions this patriarchal construction of sex and gender, suggesting that sex is expressed through a continuum, rather than as an opposing couplet based on heterosexist male/female polarities. Accordingly, within my voluptuary multi-verse, containments designed for womanhood/manhood are subverted by the presentation of a deceptive reversal. What may appear to be an image of quintessential stereotypical femaleness (bulbous silicon-implanted breasts) is in fact a digitally manipulated image of a male buttocks (mine). This also creates a bit of perverse fun with the subject matter, as the exposing of the buttock in America is termed “mooning,” or “shooting a moon.” But the serious side of lunar voluptuary is that it fabricates a mutable image of pan-sexuality which then in the adjacent chamber undergoes continual virus attacks. Here gender performance fails to sustain sex oppression by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other. This critique of gender representation in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of gender representation in the political sense.
notes：
(1) The word “voluptuary” generally means “evoked to pleasure” It comes from a Late-Latin variant of the Latin voluptarius / voluptas.
(2) Pomology is aimed at confronting an idea with its own limits. The idea is rendered precise in Deleuze’s essay “lossowski or Bodies-Language” which is found in his book “the Logic of Sense” Here Deleuze develops the term “pornology” so as to describe the dynamic of a transcendental empiricism in (the circuit Klossowski establishes between theology, as a divine belief structure, and pornography, as a perverse expression of the body.)
(3) One here thinks of Alan Turing (the grandfather of computing) and his horrid endurance of a quack treatment for his homosexuality where he was overdosed with female hormones to the point where he developed breasts.)
Lunar v0luptuary (West wall), 2002. computer virus installation, computer robotic asisted acrylic on canvas, projection, computer, projector, bench. 270 × 148 cm (acrylic). Courtesy of the artist
