Presenting: Housework Ritual, Fang Lu, video, 10’58”, 2009
Artist Introduction
Born in Guangzhou and now based in Beijing, Fang Lu received her BFA in Graphic Design from the School of Visual Art, New York in 2005 and her MFA from the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Arts Institute in 2007.
Artwork Introduction
Fang invited female staff who work in a hotel to “perform” housework in various locations across the property. These activities which are normally internalized become ritualized performances in the video; their actions are repetitive and their labor yields no results. The aesthetic of women in our society is often separated from the everyday labor they engage in, and these works are often identified as actions that are internal, domestic and with no transcendental value. This video removes the functionality of housework and uses it to create rituals and a new aesthetic.
Performers: Wang Le, Zhang Cai Lian, Jia Shen Shen, Liu Wan, Li Na, Xiao Qun Yan
Lighting: Hua Shu Liang
Assistant: Lu Jia
Special Thanks to Walker Boutique Hotel- Xi’an.
Arthub invited Leigh Tanner, Research and Public Program Coordinator at the Shanghai Project, to speak with the artist about her work. Find out how Lu interweaves the mundane aspects replicated daily in all of our lives with her videos – creating performative digital mirrors for our viewing introspection.
Inspired by the public perception of domestic work as lacking substantial value, Fang Lu’s
Housework Ritual transplants the invisible labor of the home into the sterile setting of a boutique hotel in Xi’an. Uniformed female hotel employees wash and chop vegetables, sew buttons and clean plates. Work that is historically considered domestic both in China and abroad is transformed through repetition and its placement in this unusual context. The performed repetition in the work both erases and creates new meaning as the duplication of menial tasks illuminates that which is usually private, and yet the purposeless chores are without any achievable ends. The viewer is left to quietly contemplate young women who have been separated from reality while remaining fixedly within in their professional sphere.
The work is filled with poignant visuals: a woman sits perched on the edge of a hotel bathtub filled with red and green peppers bobbing aimlessly in the water, and methodically cleans them one by one, dipping them in and out of the bath and then tossing them to the bathroom floor; a pair of women stand at a reception desk loaded with vegetables, one precisely cutting each vegetable individually and then brushing the remains onto the lobby floor, all the while standing atop a luggage cart; two women ride in a moving elevator, one systematically sewing multicolored buttons onto the back of the other’s uniform as the elevator’s movement indicates the passage of time.
Time and time again the viewer is presented with the final results of this non-action: stacked and gleaming plates, shiny and discarded vegetables, unused and mismatched buttons. Despite the seeming impractical uselessness of these completed tasks, the ritualized labor takes on a new function and distinguishes itself from its original context and meaning.
When asked about her inspiration for the piece, Fang explains, “we often consider domestic work to be repetitive maintenance work. There is no value created by such internal work, because in general it is to secure the continuity of important external work. I wanted to make a work using these ‘useless’ activities to perhaps create new value for it, that is not based on its practicality… It was about creating ritual in a context where ritual doesn’t exist. Having these women perform in their place of work (a hotel in this case), having them highly focused on the objects that are from their domestic lives, and using them in an eccentric way, this is how these rituals are created in the project”.
The “rituals” mentioned in the work’s title do not refer to the already established rituals of keeping house, but rather to those invoked by and depicted within the work itself. Housework Ritual demonstrates Fang’s interest in domestic labor. Much of Fang’s work deals with ritual and the interplay between performance and voyeurism, most especially in regard to the female body. She explains, “this is very much related to who I am and my interest in women.” Fang places Housework Ritual in a natural progression from Perfect Life Instruction (2009), a piece “that associates artistic work with housework.” The piece catalogued the artist as she performed housework in her studio, thereby equating the work of an artist with domestic labor. The work is viewed on a split screen and on a loop, emulating the endless and cyclical nature of the mindless tasks depicted. Onscreen, Fang clips her nails, irons her clothes, does her laundry and brushes her hair.
Automatic Happening (2010), which follows Housework Ritual, is a performative video that addresses comparable themes by building on a similar concept. Fang Lu once again serves as protagonist, setting herself in a space that awaits renovation. Decked out in a motorcycle helmet and an all-black outfit, she utilizes the array of household and commonplace items arranged before her. The work is presented in dual looped screens displaying the same actions at a slight delay and from different vantage points. Fang moves from one task to another, the only continuity created by the physical collection of all movements around the table and the only cohesive element being a sense of aimlessness.
Fang feels no need for hierarchy in the way video art is presented or viewed, believing that “as long as the viewer makes the effort to watch the video, the concept can be delivered, even if it is screened online.” However, through an online screening, the work, which makes visible and ritualizes oft-ignored forms of labor, is likely to be viewed from the comfort of one’s own home rather than in a gallery. This is particularly intriguing when considering the ways images of the female form are usually consumed in the media, both on the web and in the media. In this piece, the commonplace behaviors of sexualization and voyeurism regularly found online are challenged by the tender way in which the camera lingers on the chopped vegetables strewn across the hotel lobby floor or the gleam of clean plates.
Fang’s commitment to developing new platforms for video art extends beyond her practice and includes activities outside the studio. She is also co-founder of Video Bureau, an independent institution archiving, exhibiting and collecting video works in Guangzhou and Beijing. Initiated with fellow artists Chen Tong and Zhu Jia, Video Bureau aims to cultivate an interest in video art in China. The question of how and in what manner to preserve video works remains at the forefront of the fledgling scene and Video Bureau is helping to pioneer one response to these queries as the first archive of its kind in Beijing and Guangzhou.
In the context of her previous efforts championing the sharing and screening of video works online, her participation in Arthub Asia’s Screening seems especially apt. Fang even says she “hopes there will be opportunities for Video Bureau and Arthub to connect each other’s resources and work on a collaborative endeavor” in the future.
Keep an eye out for Fang Lu’s upcoming video, currently in postproduction, which was shot entirely on mobile phones and will be premiered online, a true testament to her position as a digital native. She is also currently working on a book, which will look at her projects from the past three years.
– Text by Leigh Tanner
Arthub would like to thank Lu and Leigh for participating in Arthub’s Screening Program, check out what’s on next here.
Leigh Tanner is a researcher, avid consumer of all high/low culture and bona fide art nerd. A Stanford and Columbia graduate, she is currently working on the
Shanghai Project at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum. Follow her on Instagram @lctanner
