Bovey LeesChildhood Torture Covering Mouth

Artist Bovey Lees PapercutChildhood Torture Covering Mouth Xuan Rice Paper20x162007

Pinching Cheeks

Pulling Ears

Pulling Hair

Brief history of Papercutting

Brief history of PapercuttingWen xifu yao wen shouqiao de (If you ask for a daughter-in-law ask for nimble fingers). -Ansai ProverbVillage women of grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and grand daughters made paper cutouts after a days housework to pass time, bond, perform healing rituals or earn extra income.

Brief history of PapercuttingIt is a regional craft and paper cutouts can look dramatically different from town to town, and province to province.

Brief history of PapercuttingSome paper cutting masters do not draw or use templates and just cut from the mind.

My father is an art lover and amateur artist. An interior designer by training, he likes all kinds of art. When I went back to Hong Kong in 2005, he gave me his small paper cutting collection. I immediately wanted to know whether I had the chops to make them because they looked so intricate and difficult to create Bovey Lee

(http://boveylee.wordpress.com)

Artist Bovey Lees Template for Childhood Torture-Covering MouthDigital Rendering & hand drawing2006I am 10 out of 10 times more moved when seeing a paper cutout made by hand than a vector illustration. So in terms of spiritual and artistic versatility, theres a sense of intimacy, romanticism, and humanity that paper cutouts exude. When I make or look at paper cutouts, I think about its long history, its diversity, its many anonymous artists, and its sheer beauty.- Bovey Lee (http://boveylee.wordpress.com)

Artist Bovey Lees PapercutChildhood Torture Covering Mouth Xuan Rice Paper20x162007

Close Up of Collar

Close Up Feathered Fringe:Mouth Wide Open - Uvulas

Artist Bovey Lees PapercutChildhood Torture Covering Mouth Xuan Rice Paper20x162007

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Atomic Jellyfish

Papercuts were traditionally created as a way to entertain, prove skill, demonstrate marriageability, perform healing rituals, and illustrate stories. According to Wu (2007), Folk paper-cutting has become perhaps one of the most successful visual emblems of Chinese culture (p. 66).

This art form has become a source of national pride for the Chinese and many Chinese governmental agencies have been established to protect, maintain and innovate this folk craft.

*Wu (2007) discusses the desires of parents-to-be to deliver a girl with skillful hands and also of mothers who were seeking potential daughter-in-laws to find girls who were shou qiao de (with skillful hand) (p. 110). Having a skillful hand with nimble fingers was seen as necessary to serve a family. Skilled hands were helpful and crucial for a woman to assist with agricultural labor, domestic needs (needlework, shoe making, weaving, etc.), healing rituals and/or in entertaining.

*Vintage Chinese Doll Paper CuttingLee received from father on trip back to Hong KongInspiration for Lees Childhood Torture Image

*In Covering Mouth the stark white positive spaces of the incised rice paper depict a young woman, who looks like the Lee, with her hands clasped together over her mouth in a silencing gesture.

*The incised young womans clasped hands obscure the top of what appears to be a cloth, possibly a collar, whose bottom half is embedded with a transformed lotus flower. The outer petals of this singular lotus motif are depicted as lightening bolts, while inner petals are incised with targets and intricately cut out female gender symbols of Venus.

These gender symbols, comprised of a circle with a small equilateral cross underneath, evoke notions of femininity (Stearn, 1962).

The center petals of the lotus are represented by a larger target symbol, which sits centered beneath the young womans grasped hands and obscured chin. From the downward facing triangulated corner of this cloth, nine feathers hang from what appear to be small-scale sultry, fully opened lips.

*These lips seem parted in a shout, as uvulas dangle from the back of the nine implied throats. The nine hanging feathers protrude downward from these screaming mouths like fringe towards the ground.

*Bovey Lee was born in Hong Kong and is currently a full-time artist and Associate Professor in Studio Art based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

She has been practicing Chinese calligraphy since the age of ten, Lee later learned painting and drawing in her formative years and completed her BA in Studio Arts degree in 1991 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. \In 1993, Lee came to the United States to study as a painter at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned her first MFA in Painting in 1995. The advent of technology inspired Lee to return to school in 1997 when she subsequently earned her second MFA in digital arts at Pratt Institute. She lived in New York from 1996 to 1999. In 2000, Lee moved to Pittsburgh where she has been creating paper cutouts that combine my disparate expertise in both traditional and digital media since 2005.

*I feel that Boveys papercuts can be seen as a metaphor for her own life.

I argue that Lees papercut artworks, including Childhood Torture-Covering Mouth, convey Lees modern and transnational attitude toward technology, history and gender, as well as her own cultural and ethnic identity.

*As a transnational Chinese American woman, Lee allows the viewer to glimpse the effects of her twenty-first century, diasporic condition and her attempts toward both assimilation and securing cultural identity. Lees artwork shows us her inevitable reinscription of Chineseness through travel and diaspora and uncovers both Western and Chinese viewers notions of Chineseness as ethnicity in racialist thinking (Shih, 2002, p. 113).

*Her negotiations with her transnational identity have been complimented by her own negotiations with her artistic processes. Her background in the traditional mediums of calligraphy and painting have been negotiated with her training in digital art to result in the computer assisted templates that inform her traditionally hand cut Xuan rice paper artworks.

Lee acknowledges the ambiguity in her process and equates it with her transnationality in her exhibition catalogue for Gossamers Edge (2007) when she states, The advent of digital technology and the Internet further complicates but confirms that ones identity can be messy and ambiguous. As a Hong Kong Chinese living in America, ambiguity is a condition I am very familiar with (p. 1).

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