Radical Woman 38

In this piece, I wrote out all the characters that use the Woman Radical [女] (number 38 in the standard Kangxi dictionary (1716-1912)). I chose to use the characters found on the MDBG database (a free online English to Chinese dictionary) because for the modern audience, it is more likely that non-Chinese speaking users will access this resource as opposed to physical dictionaries.

 

In terms of the medium used, I chose to write on tracing paper that had been taken out from my childhood Chinese writing practice books. These practice books would contain printed characters for the user to trace countless times, so as to learn the shapes and stroke order of the characters by repetition. Thus by using an identical medium in this piece, I wanted to invoke the same working principle for these female gendered words. Notably, Chinese characters have origins in pictorial language, and the act of tracing these gendered terms can form mental associations that reinforce the patriarchal outlook of historic Chinese culture. When learning to write these characters at a young age, the process of learning Chinese as a language is already inextricably linked with the inheritance of a dated outlook on gender equality.

 

I chose to overlay the characters with a cut-out of the woman character [女] as a subtle, but all-encompassing and uniting feature of the characters written below. In the Chinese writing system, the [女] radical has been created with a separate designation from the radical used for people in general [人]. Meanwhile, the equivalent male radical [亻] is synonymous with [人] [lit. people] in the same way [man] is still often used interchangeably with [human] in the English language. The message is clear: man is the norm and woman is the other. Now let us take this one step further; do these characters alone describe everything that it means to be female? Alternatively, are these the characters with which we can describe the key distinguishing features of women that segregates females from being just human?

 

Lastly, I used red chain stitches to seal the artwork. These have been employed in the typical style of guidelines used in character boxes to help centre and shape written Chinese characters. The chain stitches which I use throughout my work (see Dice x2) symbolise the double meaning of using chains to lock down meaning as well as the chaining together of ideas. Here, the notion of what it means to be female is chained down to these characters, and has been linked through the cultural history of Chinese character development.