“Each of the four women in the video are me, they’re representative portraits of the Taiwanese woman. They all appear to be a little bit morbid, which is caused by the pressure of a grand era they lived in.” In the four channel video installation Aphasia (2014), Yintzu Huang directs herself as multiple women, each inhabiting a separate frame (the golden ovals recall worn daguerrotypes). Not content to remain within their domains, the four women that Huang plays often interact across their boundaries.
Chloe Yintzu Huang. Aphasia. 2014. Film still. © 2015 the artist.
Beginning with a monologue by a sinicized Taiwanese aboriginal, of the late 19th century, the film first engages with the attenuation of indigenous culture with Han settlement. Dressed in Han-style clothing, she narrates in Hakka, unlike the second figure, whose pink kimono and Japanese speech indicates later, colonial rule. Her stories and activities center around her husband, who was sent to the battlefield during the Sino-Japanese War. The third woman, dressed in qipao and finery, is spouse of a military officer who fled Shanghai with the defeated Nationalists in the late 1940s, and the final harks back to Yintzu’s mother in the 1980s, who talks in Mandarin about the movies, studying abroad, a lover —all the trappings of a liberalizing society.
The four engage in repetitive, monotonous activities and chores; they sew, eat, arrange flowers and hack at fish. The trivial stories they share about food, relationships, dreams and shopping—to name a few—reveal the sociocultural changes of Taiwan’s past century. Even as society shifts, the women stay in lively conversation: perhaps Huang intends to comment on the absorption of female time in repetitive, gendered tasks and waiting for male partners while waiting for their man to come home. (Although men are not to be seen, their presence infiltrates the narratives.)
Chloe Yintzu Huang. Aphasia. 2014. Film still. © 2015 the artist.
Chloe Yintzu Huang. Aphasia. 2014. Film still. © 2015 the artist.
Here, the women actively engage in an intimate conversation, with viewers rather than voyeurs. It isn’t until we approach the end of the film that it becomes clear they have difficulties communicating with each other, given the schizophrenic linguistic structure of the piece. In an enthusiastic conversation about a shopping list, despite temporal distance, the kimono woman blurts out, “What are you talking about? I don’t understand a word.”
These differences in the way they speak are telling. Frequently a temporary shelter for different ethnic groups, languages and cultures on this island have never been unified. The kimono woman speaks Japanese with an accent, while the qipao woman from Shanghai continues speaking her authentic Shanghainese though she lives in the countryside in northern Taiwan. The languages in Taiwan are not merely diverse; they underwent intense pidginization. As languages change with the victors of history, multiple accents come to be imprinted on the speech patterns of the island. These subtleties aren’t perceivable to all, and Huang is clearly aware of this barrier. Aphasia, or the language disorder that prevents communication, gives way here to a space to murmur freely.
Aphasia was exhibited at the SVA gallery in Chelsea, New York in 2014, and at Reed College, Portland in 2015.
