Embrace by Unknown Artist
Embrace by Unknown Artist.
Elevator Corridor, Floors 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, Langham Place Hotel, Hong Kong
Having recently begun to adhere to nuptial vows you might imagine that this image appeals to me, with its depiction of domestic bliss in which three figures, mother, father and child adhere to one another like stacked chairs. And you would be right, it did stir in me a kind of urge that might be called reactionary, but which, when we really believe in it, we prefer to understand as deriving of an underlying truth which completely undercuts the political.
But then I look closer, and I see how my longing for intimacy, and potentially also procreation, are being positioned in a certain way. For it is the father that supports both physically and we can assume emotionally, both the mother, and through the mother, the child. The loving embrace of his two arms comes to seem like the jaws of a big fish eating a little fish eating a littler fish. Yes, the most suitable name for the picture would be, of course, patriarchy. For it is the overall faceless authority of the father that makes the tenuous and vulnerable love and even material existence of mother and child possible. It may be, even, an argument for fascism, if we are willing to understand ourselves as both sexual vessels as well as children of the state.
And for this reason I decided that the statue was anatomically unsavoury, not impossible of course, simply ignoring the likelihood that the woman in the centre of the piece would most likely be supporting both the child, in rearing it into subjectivity as well as that of the man, the father, perpetual child, as equally demanding of love and material attention as any helpless bub. Yes, she should be depicted as bearing the weight of both sides, like the beam of a suspension bridge, without whom all would collapse into the formlessness below.