Shayne Phua: A roast of Asian nine tails topped with broken femur and bile, accompanied by more curious ingredients: A Solo Exhibition by Shayne Phua

So famous was the Master’s supposed dictum that it inspired poet Yuan Mei’s anthology of short stories, What the Master Would Not Discuss, first published in 1788, which revolved around a plethora of matters considered decidedly un-Confucian. Phua, however, has derived her primary inspiration from another Qing-dynasty collection, the much acclaimed Liaozhai zhiyi by Pu Songling, generally known in English as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. (The title of the present exhibition was, in its original incarnation, “Strange Tales”.) Pu’s voluminous collection includes almost 500 narratives that deal with the paranormal, of which more than eighty concern foxes (Kang 83). A number of these involve romance between mortal men and fox spirits in the guise of women, who are depicted as being desirous of human acceptance, or assimilation into human society. This collision of worlds – ours and another – is naturally the chief interest of these narratives. As has been noted, the otherworldly is given credence by a pseudo-historical veneer. “Liaozhai tales”, Sinologist Judith Zeitlin observes, “deliberately straddle the border between fictional and historical discourse and are indeed predicated in part on the ensuing ambiguity” (Zeitlin 5). Here, Phua transposes the author’s literary conceit into the visual register. She borrows the trope of ontological ambivalence – of uncertainty regarding fundamental issues of being and existence – to cast doubt on received wisdom and popular belief, manifesting this sense of misgiving in the deliberate confusion of forms and functions: gallbladders as lamps, bones as candle holders, pastries as ornamental motifs, cakes and jars as fountains, nine-tailed fox spirits as Confucian deities. 

What the artist gently probes, however, are concerns very much of the here and now: the here of her native Singapore, the now of the little red dot in the twenty-first century. The fox sculpture, for one, titled You turn Confucius on his head (2024), gestures at the history of the ‘Asian values’ debate in this part of the world. Espoused by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in the 1980s and 90s – Lee went so far as to invite overseas Chinese academics to build a curriculum in Confucian ethics for local schools (Chia) – this discourse of a distinctly un-Western ideology emphasized prerogatives vaguely ascribed to Confucius: “society above the individual, valuing harmony over contestation, and devolving political decision making to appointed experts rather than popular vote” (Jenco 237). The ever wary Phua points to the political convenience of a creed premised on unquestioning faith; indeed, the utilitarian ends that Confucianism has served in this context dovetails with the myriad guises of the shapeshifting fox. The literary roots of the work, in fact, complicates the matter yet further. The maligned fox spirit of myth is typically associated with lust and sexual predation among other undesired traits, but the vulpine women of Pu Songling’s collection are, surprisingly, faithful lovers, helpers and even saviours. “We can even say they are intellectually and morally superior if compared with their human counterparts”, historian Paolo Santangelo remarks. “They nurture deep amorous feelings toward their lover, and are very helpful to his health and career. Their uncommon brilliance makes them the real protagonists of the plots, even more so than the male heroes” (Santangelo 142). Such, then, is the real face of the fox spirit in the artist’s reckoning – a gifted tutelary entity that looks askance at Janus-faced politics, its unpalatable public image belied by a secretly beneficent character. 

That Phua’s objects represent critical engagements with their subject matter is clear enough. She interrogates a broad range of social, political and cultural realities by transforming otherwise functional designs into uncanny anomalies that also serve as statements on the world around her. The critical edge of her vision, however, is reflected not just in the themes of her work, but also embodied in her choice of medium. Ceramics fall into the category of ‘craft’, a broad, amorphous grouping of things and techniques associated with makers, artisans and cottage industry, from the needle- and loom-based processes of fabric, to the tools of the carpenter and metal worker, to the wheel utilized in pottery production. Craft was long regarded as the poor country cousin of the elitist and rarified realm of art, but that stereotype has undeniably shifted in the other direction. Unlike mechanized possibilities for various modes of making, however, artists working with clay remain tied to the labour of their hands. Where textile artists or sculptors working with steel or wood are able to outsource at least a part of their fabrication process and still legitimately claim authorship, a ceramic artist enjoys no such luxury. “The very fact of making a thing by hand,” it has been argued, “is political because handcraft runs counter to the hegemonic industrially made, mass-produced environment that pertains today” (Wood 3). In an age where automation has taken over much of the physicality of work and life itself seems to move ever further into the realm of the digital, the simple act of manual production – spending several days coiling the tails on a fox, as Phua has done – may be construed as a gesture of resistance, an act with political dimensions. 

The political aspect of Phua’s practice, to reiterate the point, extends beyond the facts of her thematic concerns, materialized as it is in the concrete forms of her works. Perhaps the strangeness of the Liaozhai stories, the fog of spectral uncertainty that infects her unfamiliar, murmuring objects, may also be said to inform the ethos of her identity as an artist. There is something peculiar, indeed, about the image of a nine-tailed fox that hovers between mythic trickster and Confucian figure, supernatural helpmeet and shapeshifting politician, cult deity and work of art. There is, just as oddly, the inescapable whiff of futility about the act of sitting in studio for hours on end, day after day, laboriously shaping clay to make statements about varieties of strangeness – a reflexively strange activity, if nothing else.

References

Chia, Yeow Tong. “The Elusive Goal of Nation Building: Asian/Confucian Values and Citizenship Education in Singapore During The 1980s.” British Journal of Educational Studies 59:4 (2011): 383–402. 

Jenco, Leigh. “Revisiting Asian Values.” Journal of the History of Ideas 74:2 (2013): 237–58.

Kang, Xiaofei. The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Santangelo, Paolo and Yan Beiwen. “An Introduction to Zibuyu’s Concepts and Imagery: Some Reflections and Hypotheses.” Zibuyu, “What The Master Would Not Discuss”, according to Yuan Mei (1716-1798): A Collection of Supernatural Stories. Ed. Paolo Santangelo. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. 1–160. 

Wood, D. “Introduction: Re-crafting an unsettled world.” Craft is Political. Ed. D Wood. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 1–17. 

Zeitlin, Judith. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.