These five art pieces were exhibited during the dual art exhibition A Soft Spot on Tough Skin at the Luxemburg Rainbow LGBTQ Centre from April-June 2024. They are part of my ongoing artist project into creating feminist anime art.
This ongoing artistic project queries how influence of Japanese anime and videogame ("geemu") culture + its gender dynamics are reflected in my drawing hand and in the history of my relationship to my own body. In these drawings, I seek to express my complicated love-hate relationship to the anime visual culture in which I grew up. I likely expressed my early queerness unknowingly as a teenager by drawing beautiful anime girls, but later on grew to resent that desire when I came into my feminism and started to see how sexist, patriarchal, submissive and grossly Lolita-like my beloved anime girls actually were. My own desire for them became complicit with the male gaze I was trying to outrun, and for most of my 20s, I thus also ended up running away from anime.
In this project, I return my queer, female gaze onto the anime girl in order to explore the markers and signifiers what makes for ‘good’ and ‘natural’ femininity within her world, how the anime girl herself both submits to and subverts these and how I as artist, as surveyor-of-women and as woman-surveyed, can express my discomfort with and draw resistance to hetero-patriarchal ideals of womanhood.
Triptych overview
Love & Hate
150x100cm - pencil, acrylics & ecoline on paper cut out and board
150x100cm - pencil, acrylics & ecoline on paper cut out and board
Performance & Performativity
150x100cm - pencil, acrylics & ecoline on paper cut out and board
150x100cm - pencil, acrylics & ecoline on paper cut out and board
Dance & Dance
150x100cm - pencil, acrylics & ecoline on paper cut out and board
150x100cm - pencil, acrylics & ecoline on paper cut out and board
