Bees in the Body Temple: an attempt to decode Zhe Chen’s photography

Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.
(1 Corinthians 3:19-20).

“Brought up in Beijing, China, Zhe Chen is a photo-based artist currently living in Los Angeles. In the past four years, Zhe has created a series of projects focusing on body modification, human hair, identity confusion, post-traumatic stress disorder, and memory. Zhe’s winning project is a document of self-mortification among a community of disaffected Chinese. The difficult nature of her subject is made more complex by Chen’s lyrical approach, identifying the physical self-destruction of her subjects as an act of spiritual cleansing.” That is how in some sixty words the Inge Morath Foundation and the Magnum Foundation have summarized the essence of Zhe Chen’s early master piece Bees in their introduction to the 2011 Award presented to her.

I first saw Zhe Chen’s earlier photographs, a series of self-portraits called The Bearable which received the Three Shadows Award, at Caochangdi PhotoSpring Festival in April 2011. Pinned to one wall were pieces of a puzzle depicting painful memories. There were no captions, so I thought it was again some young Chinese woman photographer toying with the fashionable “private photography”. When at last in Shanghai I encountered the photographer in person, I was immediately attracted to Zhe’s darkness and surprising self-awareness in spite of her young age. More specifically, that at 21 of age, her creation grew uniquely from her own personal experiences as a self-mutilating practitioner, impressed and touched me profoundly. There is something in her secret yet exhibitionistic nature that convinced me she was of the caliber of an “author photographer”.

Zhe started hurting herself seven years ago, when she attended a top high school in Beijing, consequence of “bad blood” with her authoritarian parents who are high ranking party officials. After earning a scholarship at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design she began showing her photographic diary of self-harm as an assignment for her class, and that became the starting point of a healing process. Yet today she still cannot resist the temptation of relapse from time to time just to “enjoy” the thrill of seeing blood seeping out of her self-inflicted cut. In Ancient Greece, Hippocrates believed that bloodletting a patient to restore health acted like the process of menstruation; insofar as menstruation functioned “to purge women of bad humors”. In modern day there are people, especially young women suffering from depression and/or inability for social adaptation, who tend to fall into a pattern of cutting or lacerating parts of their bodies as a way to “survive” when they are not ready to commit suicide. One of the most haunting pictures of Jane Evelyn Atwood’s monumental work on women in prison shows a display of lacerated forearms with ugly and badly stitched wounds lined up side by side, punctuated by marks of cigarette burns. Those scars or marks are from four suicidal women cellmates of Pardubice Detention Center in the Czech Republic in 1992 (*1). Award winning Japanese photographer Kosuke Okahara has revealed the phenomenon to the world through his photo-reportage of self-mutilating Japanese girls (*2).

As a way to better understand herself and to further her photographic art, Zhe has embarked on a project consisting of extending her self-portraits by finding and photographing people who share the same or similar pathology with her. From the relatively simple act of tattooing one’s skin, or of ear piercing to the more serious acts of auto-mutilation and body modification, Zhe found those she calls “Bees” by showing them first her own scars. She calls them “Bees” out of Virgil’s quote: They left their lives in the very wounds they had created for themselves. And I have been carrying with me a quote of Leonard Cohen which I had wanted to use for a photographic project for many years. He wrote in the Favorite Game: “Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh” (*3). And I felt like a wish fulfilled when I found Zhe Chen’s photos. “Photographing my bruised body is the perfect way to evacuate the unspeakable suffering in a tangible form.” said Zhe as if she wanted to share her secret with me.

I have been wondering why there are people who are afraid of pain and others who relish pain. Humanity seems to be made of those who inflict wounds and pain on others and those who self inflict sufferings. From the ancient age, conquerors, dictators and slave masters have used corporal punishments and tortures to impose physical and psychological dominance. And since the Passion of Christ, fanatical religious followers have practiced self-harm and self-flagellation in their monastery cells and in public processions as a means to experience divinity. By marking stigmata on their bodies, which resembled the wounds of Jesus Christ’s crucified body, they intend to purge their imaginary or collective sins. For this body temple, they believe, is also home to the devil. In Tuol Sleng, the Museum of Genocide in Cambodia, the horror photographs are fading with time, but one icon in the history of photography stands out, sadly, and painfully vivid in the minds of viewers. “A young boy, dazed and shirtless, staring at the camera expressionless, eyes vaguely lowered. Because he wore no clothes when arrested, the executioners had fixed a safety pin directly onto his skin, bearing the number “17”, in the inventory of the tortured victims.” (*4) Today’s stigmata have been deviated from an act of religious devotion or spiritual salvation into a form of body art or eroticism. Beyond tattoos and piercing there are all sorts of scarifications and microdermal implants inflicted on any part of the body, even leaving “artistic” scars or marks through painful and quasi-surgical procedures.
In a way, at the very origin, we all share one common experience of pain: our belly button is here to testify to our coming to life through an injury. This universal scar of ours gives all its sense to Cohen’s “word made flesh”. Beyond nationality, religious and cultural differences, what cuts into our skin – the envelope of our body temple – is the same universal pain. This initial pain is perhaps the reason-why the overarching goal we pursue in life is happiness.

And when we cannot find happiness, Zhe shows us, we shall commit further sacrileges to our body temple by inflicting violence on our body. Zhe’s collective of bees are simply “those who are different”, in the definition of Diane Arbus when in 1963, she set out to look for and photograph midgets, transvestites, those with Down syndrome, transsexuals, individuals with abnormal physical identity standards, the tattooed and the nudists, and so on, those she called “an American experience”. Yet Zhe’s collective does not look like another parade of “freaks” (*5). They are, rather, performers of a secret society that practice auto-mutilation: artists of razor blade or cigarette burns, of controlled eating disorders, performers of body modification. They are modern day students of the Marquis de Sade and of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In apparently quiet and well-balanced photographs, under the surface lies a tension that spells danger, violence, and threat, Zhe’s portrayals physically magnify what Roland Barthes called “punctum”, (*6) in such a sense that we ache just by looking at some of the close-ups.

It is this physical “sting” of Zhe’s Bees that leads to our emotional disturbance. It is this pain that makes us realize how much we are physically and emotionally alive. Not only does Zhe reveal to us a world in which we are totally unfamiliar, but she also drops in our lap an incomprehensible world. What the innocent blue angel in her swimsuit is hiding is the detail that pierces the surface of apparent tranquility. It is a Diane Arbus secret.(*7) It doesn’t suffice merely to locate and identify the tell-tale scars on her skin, but one needs to ask why and how and who she is, and who they are, anyway, all of them? This run-away girl who tries to hide from a violent and abusing family, is portrayed in a blue swim suit against a blue background, droplets running down her goggled cheeks like tears, her clenched hands shaking, it reminds me of Luc Besson’s movie of 1988 The Big Blue, which attracted a huge teenage audience for its romanticism tinted with suicidal impulses. The young girl forced by her parents to undergo spinal corrective surgery and turned self-harm adept, the gang member turned body modification artist finding salvation in being suspended by his skin, the young night club hostess practicing S&M rituals, the sufferers of eating disorders and Hikikomori syndrome (*8) who only find comfort in self-harm in their secret hide-out. Who are they? And Why? The troubling questions arise like storms in our brains. We shall leave them to specialists and experts in wide-ranging fields: medicine, psychotherapy, sociology, politics, philosophy or theology. What we can only say is that here we have powerful but at the same time indeed, lyrical, photographs.

Unlike Arbus’ physically obvious freaks, Zhe’s subjects’ “aristocracy”(*9) remains indefinable, true to their own secret ritual they would only share with Zhe, and in a more subdued and inward-looking way than the victims of obsession and dependency captured by the blatant flash of Nan Goldin (*10). Not content to hang around or accompany them to the hospital, Zhe persuaded her subjects to pose in the nude by removing her own clothes to reveal her scars. This compassion helps explain the total self-abandon displayed by her subjects, in a way only offered to someone who is a member of the same club, a la Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki (*11).

Finally, Zhe’s poetry and lyricism lie in her exploration of the different genres, from portraits, landscape to still-life, with a treatment akin to an instinctive deep breath after you nearly drown. Her camera points down, shoots up, lying in bed, getting wet in the shower, blurry as the subject breathes out into the lens. Zhe’s composition recalls the creativity and freedom of experimentation that were the signature of another tragic genius in photography, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). The photograph of the bloody bandage wrapped around the wrist of one of the bees strangely echoes that of Francesca Woodman wearing tree bark on her arms (*12).
Enough with comparison, Zhe Chen’s Bees has no equivalent in Chinese photography; the subject also reveals a facet of China unseen before.
One can interpret Zhe’s images according to one’s sense and sensibility; but there is no rationale besides the esthetic quality, and beyond our fascination with the awkward smile on the face of the blue swimmer and the tiny marks on her forearms, left by an imaginary baby shark.
Like a good movie, we come out of the screening of Bees as if we had taken a dive in the ocean, coming out of the chilly and salty water feeling fresh and alive, ready to face up to whatever that may come.

Jean Loh / Curator
(*1) Jane Evelyn Atwood, Trop de Peines – Femmes en Prison, Albin Michel 2000
(*2) Kosuke Okahara, Ibasyo, Sony World Photography Award Global Tour
(*3) Leonard Cohen The Favorite Game 1963
(*4) Christian Caujolle (founder of Agence VU’), in Circonstances Particulières – Actes Sud 2007. « Un jeune garçon, abasourdi, torse nu, fixant l’objectif sans expression, les yeux vaguement baissés. Parce qu’il ne portrait pas de vêtement lors de son arrestation, les bourreaux avaient fiché une épingle à nourrice directement dans sa peau, portant son numéro d’ordre, le 17, dans l’inventaire des suppliciés. » (*5) Freaks – a film by Tod Browning 1932 (*6) Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire – Le Seuil 1980 (*7) Diane Arbus: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Five photographs by Diane Arbus Artforum, May 1971 (*8) Hikikomori, literally “pulling away, being confined”, i.e., “acute social withdrawal”, is a Japanese term referring to the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives. (*9) “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Diane Arbus “Revelations” A retrospective catalogue 2003
(*10) Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Aperture 2004
(*11) “If the person I’m photographing is naked, then I, too, will be naked — a naked photographer!” In Photography: Tokyo Nostalgia and Sex. Interview with Nobuyoshi Araki in Japan Times 2003
(*12) Untitled: MacDowell Colony Peterborough, New Hampshire 1980, in Francesca Woodman, Phaidon 2007.

Tags: anorexia, Bees, body modification, body temple, bulimia, China, cigarette burn, depression, Inge Morath, Jean Loh, S&M, Self-harm, Zhe Chen