Image List

Left to right:

RLPA2011THFCNCPT1, Etching—toner wash, aquatint, line, 22 x 30”, edition of 7, 2011

RLPA2011THFCNCPT2, Etching—toner wash, aquatint, line, 22 x 30”, edition of 7, 2011

RLPA2011THFCNCPT3, Etching—toner wash, crackle ground, line, and photo-etching, 22 x 30”, edition of 7, 2011

RLPA2011THFCNCPT4, Etching—aquatint, line, 22 x 30”, edition of 7, 2011

RLPA2011THFCNCPT5, Etching—aquatint, line, 22 x 30”, edition of 7, 2011

Essay

excerpt

The Cyborg: Printmaking in Modern Art has been a rich vehicle for the expressionist impulse, often mobilizing the metonymy of the raw, cut mark in a block of wood as a stand-in for a bodily gesture made in response to physical pain or psychological anguish; German Expressionist woodcuts are exemplars in this regard. But the visceral quality of an etched line has also lent itself to emotionally-charged iterations: O.M .Theatre (1991), by Hermann Nitsch, the Vienna Actionist, presents etched lines that have been washed over with pig’s blood as a reminder that the body — any body — is never far away when expressions of psychic pain or hysterical cries issue forth.

The etched print works of Flora Shum, all tagged with the rubric Rules of Life – Project A, situate themselves within the expressionist field, yet are differentiated from Expressionism to the extent that they take up a contemporary program that links humanism with science. And whereas some have railed at the anguish meted out when one human is set against another, Flora Shum calls up the exhilaration and anxiety produced within a postmodern world when the body and the machine, corporeal rhythms and electronic vibrations, are in collision. In a series of five large-scale etchings, Shum portrays, variously, a cyborg body in a state of explosive transition, an archive of brain-stem cross sections and other inner-body splicings, and mechanized “chips” that float alongside those elements to infer the threat and the promise of interchangeability operations. Yet despite the seeming chaos of these unfurling, agitated terrains, there is a lyrical quality to the work that also suggests a form of transformation not dystopic at all. In an intentionally polemical statement that vacillates between excitement and dread, Flora Shum announces:

"I am left to explore the confusion of boundaries we are given, the expectations of others and of oneself, the hyper scramble to always advance and the desperation of finding a sense of belonging. This is a series of etchings, exploring the possibilities, blurring the boundaries even more, creating new bodies, new bones, new organs, new tissues, new cells, inserting information into nuclei. The idea is to create, alter, clone our genes, and construct new super-cyborgs." 5

Despite Shum’s assertions that proclaim the utopic opportunities of the cyborg body, the unease that her tumbling tableaus produce is further extended in a series of paperworks and two small sculptures within the exhibition. In her wrinkled, flesh-like paper pieces, delicately embellished with photographs that turn the works towards the memory of a passed body, Shum’s investigation/display suggests a laboratory of future possibilities and past losses. Yet the artist has not set herself up as a Frankestienian “auteur” of the scene. Instead, through the very visceral quality of her works, we sense that it is Shum’s own body that is in transformation: the machine has entered the artist, whose work is then manifest via the machine. With the work of Flora Shum, the Derridean proposition has found a new, though not untroubled, place of belonging.

5.From an artist statement by Flora Shum, provided to the writer, July 2011.

 -Patrick Mahon