PART II | DECEPTIVELY TRADITIONAL: THE ILLUSORY RADICALISM OF FAN XIAOYAN’S CYBORGS

SCHOLARSHIP ON
PHYSICAL ATTACHMENT

Scholarship on Physical Attachment is limited, and Fan Xiaoyan’s work remains relatively unknown outside of China. Shuqin Cui, the only scholar who has written about the series in English, argued that Physical Attachment disrupts conventional ideas of gender difference and socio-cultural hierarchies through the blending of machine and human forms. For Cui, Fan’s work functions as an “experiment in cyborg feminism” that subverts Chinese socialist and post-socialist discourse on the interaction between body and machine.^[70] Primarily, Cui claimed that Fan’s series comments on the history of how female bodies, associated with machines, were mistreated in both the socialist and post-socialist period.

Figure 15: Fan Xiaoyan, Physical Attachment-03, 2008. Stainless steel and mixed materials.

In this way, Cui argues that Fan’s series can be seen as a critique of the masculinization of the body that had to take place before women could form their bond with the machine in Socialist China.^[71] By portraying the woman-machine hybrid as hyperfeminine, Fan allegedly showed that the female body and machines are not incompatible. She denies the forced de-sexualization of the female body in the Communist period, reclaiming the sexual power of the female body.  However, the literal combination of the female body and the machine is not the same as the de-feminization of the body as a prerequisite for a productive worker-machine relationship. Additionally, the woman-machine relationship here is not a productive one, and the sculptures look more like awkward and beautiful objects. These sculptures do not convey the message the sexualized female body is compatible with machines, but rather turn the woman-machine relationship into an object to be looked at. Cui also asserted that the sculpture offers commentary of the treatment of the female factory worker in the post-socialist period. According to Cui, Fan critiques the abuse of these female bodies by portraying a weaponized femininity that resists domination.^[72] If one sees her cyborg women as representations of the dagongmei, Cui argued we should interpret them as a critique of the capitalist sexualization and exploitation of the female body. However, her argument is problematically vague about how exactly the sculptures undermine socialist and post-socialist rhetoric about the relationship between female bodies and machines. She simply stated that they do so because Physical Attachment “foregrounds the integration of seemingly incompatible elements: female nudes and machine parts,” and introduces the female body into the conventionally ‘masculine’ world of technology and machinery.^[73] Her argument is presented as self-evident, but is not supported by visual analysis or a detailed explanation of how the historical context and message of the sculptures are related.

Figure 13: Fan Xiaoyan, Physical Attachment-01, 2008. Stainless steel and mixed materials. 171 x 88 x 110 cm.

In contrast to what Cui argued, it is unlikely that Fan’s sculptures are a critique of the treatment of the female body in socialist and post-socialist China. Fan was born in 1983, making her part of a generation that did not experience the Cultural Revolution and was much more influenced by the process of globalization. Jie Li, a scholar concerned about the mediation of memory in modern China, has urged for the preservation and analysis of “red legacies” of the Cultural Revolution and Maoist period.^[74] She noted that “ideologies, cultures, and institutions from the Mao era have either faded away entirely or persisted in residual forms, meeting with erasure or revival at various times and places.”^[75] Many people born post-1980 were either unaware of or uninterested in the legacies of the Maoist period, growing up in a China that was rapidly globalizing and embracing the ideals of capitalism. This is partially due to a generational gap between those who experienced the Cultural Revolution and those who were born after, but also due to the government’s suppression of information. Li explained that despite the government’s 1981 resolution condemning the Cultural Revolution, “textbooks, museums, and official mass media circumvent any mention of this traumatic decade and of other sensitive histories.”^[76]

Art movements were also fundamentally affected by these factors of globalization and the suppression of “red memories.” While the art movements of the 1980s were deeply concerned with the relationship between art and society and believed art should facilitate humanism and social progress, contemporary art movements of the 1990s and beyond largely abandoned this idealism.^[77] Art historian Wu Hung attributed this shift to several factors, namely globalization, commercialization, urbanization, and changing living and working conditions for artists.^[78] These trends, which caused the direction of Chinese art to shift from modern to contemporary art in the 1990s, only intensified in the 2000s, when Fan Xiaoyan attended art school in Beijing. With the advent of the internet in the mid-90s, Chinese citizens became even more integrated on a global stage, and were exposed to a wide range of visual material. One of the most influential types of media that circulates in China (and East Asia as a whole) is Japanese animation, which serves as a more productive lens through which to read the Physical Attachment series.

Lastly, Cui also discussed how the series interacts with the viewer to convey the radical potential of the cyborg. For example, she claimed that Fan Xiaoyan’s blending of the soft forms of the female body with the hard, unyielding machine attachments disrupts a purely voyeuristic viewing experience. The experience of viewing the nude female form in a sexual way is disrupted by the “asexual mechanical toughness” of the machine parts, while a viewer who intends to focus on the machine is interrupted by the attractiveness of the nude body.^[79] I would argue that the combination of the sexualized female form and the shiny mechanical attachments does not necessarily prevent an erotic viewing experience, but suggests a connection with the commodity culture of consumer capitalism. The sexy female body, used prominently in ads in China in the 1930s, has long been associated with advertising in modern and contemporary capitalist economies. As the saying goes, “sex sells.” The shiny metal attachments also evoke associations with consumerism, as seen in smartphone advertisements (figure 5), in which the lustrous metal signifies cutting-edge, high-end, luxury technology. Therefore, these associations of both the female body and the shiny metal attachments make these sculptures a new kind of commodity, rather than disrupting the commodification of the female body. While Cui argued that “any tendency toward possessing the female body as a unified identity will fail because of the body-machine hybridity,” I contend that Fan has simply created a new unified identity, which is as easily “possessed” or visually consumed as a body without these attachments.^[80] Rather than rendering the female body as fragmentary and unobtainable, the mechanical attachments merge the two commodities together. As I will demonstrate, the addition of mechanical attachments is not enough to disrupt a process of viewing that objectifies the female body, and at times heightens this objectification.