Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies
2:1 (2004), 83-88
‘The Asian Belle’: A Visual Essay
MOON Chungmin University of Auckland CONTEMPORARY LIFE is increasingly pervaded by the world of animation. Animation is not bounded by the representational styles of filmic images, rather it opens the way for an endless variety of creativity and imagination to articulate ideas and concepts visually. This essay explores some of the issues surrounding the conjunction of different cultures through time‐based art works, taking form in animations: ‘Girl from Ipanema’, ‘The Princess’, ‘The Faux’ and ‘I Peter 2:2’. The main commonality in these works is the protagonist; the oriental girl with dark eyes and dark hair set against the surreal backdrop of a European fantasy‐like world. The girl is the Asian Belle. ‘Girl from Ipanema’ (1min 11sec) is about a girl walking around the city, looking at reality from a skewed viewpoint with a romantic, childlike and playful eye. The steps of the girl follow the mesmeric voice of Astrud Gilberto from the song, ‘Girl from Ipanema’. The portrayal of a girl in ‘The Princess’ (3min 24sec) is a poetic expression of innocent dream and feminine fancy confronted by the harshness of reality. ‘The Faux’ (2min 26sec) portrays a big‐eyed, deceptively cute and sugar sweet girl in a magical, dreamy and perfuming space. But it is actually a sad wooden puppet masquerading itself as a doll on a pedestal in the hope of being loved by everyone. Sweet, plangent music in a hushed, almost seductive tone airs throughout the animation. ‘I Peter 2:2’ is a short 3D animated work projected on the wall. Through an ambiguous image of an idyllic little girl, the work questions our universally shared loss of innocence. The image of the girl holding a balloon and blowing a bubble is a signifier for pure, innocent nostalgic childhood. Simultaneously, the image is modeled and animated in high‐tech computer software generating perceptually incongruous elements. There is a saying, ‘the child’s sob in the darkness curseth deeper than the strong man in his wrath’T1 I find a lot of charms in children, especially little girls. They seem fragile, soft and naïve and yet they can exude such strength. I looked into the little pleasures of everyday life both in the past and the present, drawing out some odd, intriguing facets from what everyday life offers and incorporated them into the world of the girl, the Asian belle. These animations present a disturbing conjunction of two different phenomena. One is innocence and the other is knowledge. In the midst of the whirlwind of technological knowledge and the knowledge of earthly desires, vanity, envy, hatred, selfish ambitions or obsessions in the world, the girl symbolizes the pure and innocent entity within us. The gaps created in the process of combining two opposing ideas produce an unsettling, disconcerting atmosphere and this visual Moon/’The Asian Belle’
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dissonance provokes a sense of anxiety and uneasiness. In this celebration of female childhood, there is another conjunction that is as strange and puzzling as the one above. In reflecting her experience, the every gesture, the glance, the slightest hint or suspicion, even a flick of a hand or the blink of an eye suggests a meaning. The subtle nuances within the environment of the girl are very significant. In the animations, there is a tinge of tattered history, a tattered elegance of a European past embedded in the flowery patterns of the background, the Victorian architecture, Pre‐Raphaelite interiors, the Paris‐like streets, the Rococo‐style furniture, the pastel toned skies, the soft fabrics, the bird cage and even in the images of a shoe. The fairy‐like oriental girl is portrayed against this European culture. There is a tangent where these two different cultures meet creating a subtle and creepy sense of discomfort. Mark Bracher has noted ‘our failure to embody such a signifier, or our embodiment of signifiers denigrated within a given code, can cause us severe anxiety or depression or evoke powerful feelings of aggression in us.’2 Two different cultural entities are stitched together in these animations setting a strange atmosphere. As the animations become enigmatic maintaining a constant but low level of tension, the audience becomes either unwarily off‐centred or ambivalently delighted. The physics of these animations challenge the audiences existing ontological assumptions. However, the audience can’t entirely dismiss those elements because there are strings of connection between those fantasies and the real world. The animations reflect facets of our lives. The Asian belle stands, walks about and floats around the imaginary world loaded with European artefacts and reflects an individual confronted by an environment, searching, building and securing their identities. Parts of these animations were inspired by European fairy tales, such as ‘The Little Red Riding Hood’ or ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in which the heroine ventures into the unknown and confronts the unexpected. It is sad that as we get older we lose the ability to see things with an untainted mind and to create our own fantasy world as we did when we were children. These animations are fantasies, mildly titillating and subtly unsettling. The Asian belle and the fantasies in these animations have been an attempt to give meaning to a part of the real world in a surreal manner. 84
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© MOON Chungmin, University of Auckland © MOON Chungmin, University of Auckland Moon/’The Asian Belle’
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© MOON Chungmin, University of Auckland The Princess 1 © MOON Chungmin, University of Auckland 86
The Princess 2 www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/gjaps
© MOON Chungmin, University of Auckland The Faux © MOON Chungmin, University of Auckland Moon/’The Asian Belle’
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NOTES 1 Cited in W.T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon – I’, The Pall Mall Gazette, online, 6 July 1885, available at: http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute/part1.html (27 February 2004).
2 Mark Bracher, Lacanian Resources for Organizational Consulting, online, 1996, available at: http://www.sba.oakland.edu/ispso/html/bracher.html (20 February 2004). 88
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