Jouissance

ALEX CU UNJIENG  

Jouissance

It’s a flower, a hoo-hah, a woo-woo, a purse, a pussy, a pocket. Rarely will we have the gall to say the word out loud. Young women in particular are taught to call it by any other name, anything but what it actually is: a vagina. 

By calling attention to this signifier of abjection - of both birth and blood, creation and destruction, and violence, always violence, Vancouver-based printmaker Alex Cu Unjieng raises the multiple ways that the vagina is interpreted in polite society. For this, the title Jouissance makes a fitting entry point (no pun intended) to expand the conversation, transcending the abjection so commonly and conventionally linked to female genitalia.

Like abjection, jouissance is exhaustively discussed in the writings of feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva, whose portrait appears in this exhibition. The word however does not directly translate: Jouissance is joy and pleasure, but it is also, among other things, shock and hysteria. Jouissance describes a lack of control and the streams of consciousness that make new ways of thinking possible--not only about body parts, but about femininity in general. It is always about transgression.

Surrounding her audience with these vaginas, Cu Unjieng gives both a name and face to that which has been hidden, condemned, and policed, but in its own way, celebrated. Through this celebration of parts unknown, Cu Unjieng invites us to go beyond looking, beyond seeing, and towards the act of occupying the image with good humor and affection.

The art practice of Alex Cu Unjieng draws heavily from the intersections of being a woman and an immigrant, creating work that expresses a constant negotiation of identity.  Cu Unjieng received her BA in Visual Arts with a minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia For Jouissance, her first solo in Manila, she combines printmaking techniques with watercolour and illustration.

                                                                                                            -----Alice Sarmiento