Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

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Finalists

2010 - The 9th Taishin Arts AwardFinalists    

-- Select Past Taishin Finalists --

Shur-tzy Hou[ Look toward the Other Side: Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan–Lulu Shur-tzy Hou Solo Exhibition ]    

Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury's comments

When artists use social issues as the subject matter for their artwork, they run the risk of falling into sentimentalism lacking formal theoretical rigor. Hou, Lulu Shur-Tzy does not try to please with formal beauty, but uses calm language with surgical precision and architectural constructions to explore topics related to geographical location. Hou uses imitation and simulacra as a metaphor for artistic language and socio-cultural significance and then transforms this into a mirror-like dialectic. She enriches the connotations of her work by photographing images (simulacra) and presenting chromatic contrasts (mirroring). She provides additional ways of looking at other people and narrating their experience by displacing narrative subjectivity with concern for the Other, thus allowing the viewer to cooly evaluate the essence of art and socio-cultural issues through the many formal levels she presents.Committe member: Cheng, Hung-Yi

Artwork Introduction

Her exhibited work was a sequel to her previous series examining the foreign bride issue in Taiwan. To explore Taiwanese-Vietnamese marital relationships, she traveled to Vietnam and interviewed the brides’ parents and contacted academic institutes, foreign offices and church groups.

The exhibition site presented photographs of the seven Vietnamese women married to Taiwanese men. A series of 74 photographs were arranged to tell their individual stories, while a small house in the center of the exhibition, focused on the story of A-lien and her struggles with a cross-culture marriage.

The interviews and documentation took five years to complete. To document the brides, Hou shot two photos: one in monochrome to reflect the artist's empathetic feeling towards the bride's plight and one in full color to capture the actual scene. The photos, then blur the boundary between the social realism of photo journalism and the aesthetic artifice of portrait photography. Accompanying the photographs, were written interviews that Hou had conducted with the brides and their families to describe young lives which are filled with hope and dreams for the future, but are tainted by the wide influence of globalization.

Two videos help to elucidate Hou's theme. In one, a bride's parents discuss their daughter's abusive marriage, her escape to return home and her sudden death from illness. The other video provides a general overview of the lives of the seven brides and the underlying pain and suffering that they share. Hou's goal was to show that in spite of grave limitations of being born female, there is also great hope.

About the Artist

Lulu Shur-Tzy Hou was born in 1962 and lives in Kaohsiung. She has an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and currently teaches at the National University of Kaoshiung.

She exhibits her art internationally. Her artwork explores issues related to gender identification, self-identification, and third-world female laborers, reflecting the voice and social-economic conditions of today's Taiwan.

For the past few years, Hou has expanded her interests from the feminist movement to concerns about social class, ethnicity, and other social-political issues in Taiwan. Hou's recent series on Asian foreign brides in Taiwan, examines the lives of these female immigrants and their struggles with identity.