Work Rings
Critical Art Studies on The Body
Mixed Media Bead Installation
Erika Yuen, 2022
Full Installation View
Materials
80 Hand Beaded Rings (beads, wire), Thread, Cord Rubber Cage, Fabric, LED Lights
Artist Statement
80 delicate hand beaded red wire rings are strung uniformly for the Work Rings mixed media installation. The rings symbolize body as labour and decrease in size as they near a black sheet to conceal the red light that represents the abstract mind. This interactive installation explores the body as a tool that is materialized to fit the needs of the mind in pursuit for ideal experiences. A critique of mind-body dualism, it comments on the unsustainable sacrifices of the body that is sacrificed, overworked, and deemed disposable in exchange of unrealistic imagined standards contingent by uncontrollable privileges.
The rings are a homage to my grandmother’s personal experiences with work and labour. In Asian heritage, hands that are tough and thick fingered represent people who have worked. The descending ring sizes reflect my grandmother outgrowing her youthful vintage rings when she began to work, a journey striving for a better life to reach fantasized experiences of the mind.
Red becomes the dominant colour to unify body and mind, and is chosen in its polarizing emotional appeal, and its spiritual meanings for physical and emotional survival. The process to hand bead and string this path of rings draws from the theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Robert Mc Ruer, and Descartes, who regard the body as a machine: one with capital value that extends from the mind to engage with the objective world. The delicate process captures the experimentation of body as a tool for capitalism and construction, and forms a long, winding, and complicated journey that paradoxes the flat underwhelming light of the mind that it desperately pursuits.
These fleeting mind pleasures are further criticized in investigation of biological and socio-economic contingencies that affect our body’s ability to work and achieve. The interactive installation encourages the audience to test their will for sacrifice as they attempt to squeeze through the narrowing path to touch the end. Our fingers, the body, becomes mediums of the artwork, as these philosophers have also regarded the body as malleable substance. The plot twist arises in realization that certain people, with slender, delicate fingers- who’ll never have to work– will be able to reap these awards and slip through the ring path far sooner than tough-fingered workers.
Alas, sacrifice and overworking the body has no guaranteed ideal outcome. Bounded by the physical and macro limits of our bodies, isolating the body against the preservation, and pleasuring of the mind is a toxic cycle that is unsustainable and often un-achievable. Work Rings hopes to bring light to self-care for the physical body, as it realizes that the body may be worked in creative methods and long journeys, but all at what cost?
Appendix: Process Documentation
Please note these are not part of the installation itself.
