Finding the devil inside you

It's been estimated that half of all Taiwanese women have had an abortion at one point in their lives. It's a recent trend, and understandably it creates strong feelings of guilt in those mothers who never were. In a highly superstitious society, this guilt is often personified as yingling (嬰靈) or baby spirits -- ghosts of aborted fetuses believed to haunt people until exorcised or appeased by priests.

In The Haunting Fetus, Marc L. Maskowitz points out that what's interesting about appeasing baby spirits is the way the appeasement ritual conflicts with traditional Confucian values. It's very un-Confucian for an older generation to pray to a younger generation. But the alternative is to be responsible for a baby spirit wandering aimless and alone through the netherworld. The dilemma is one of reconciling new values (here: abortion, a product of economics, individualism and other contemporary factors) with traditional beliefs.

A Group of Demons Dancing in Dissolute Revelry (群魔亂舞), now showing at the Eslite Gallery, is a six-artist exhibition featuring hundreds of gory, sex-obsessed drawings providing a cathartic expression of this kind of conflict. There's nothing in the show specifically about abortion, but sexuality and mutilated images of the human body are so consistent throughout the show that it springs to mind, as well as more general trends, like the hedonism and materialism cited in the exhibition statement as an impetus behind the works.

In all, six artists contributed to the show, which includes hundreds of drawings. Some works are large and carefully rendered, but most are small sheets taped to the wall, many of which have been torn from sketchbooks. Most are in fact sketches, quick ideas. And as a body, they have a lot of things in common.

Describing a few gives a pretty good idea of the whole. There are show organizer Yao Ruie-chung's (姚瑞中) fornicating, masturbating and vagina-spreading demons, Shih-dou's (石斗) surgically joined heads, Zhao Lu-jia's (趙璐嘉) dissecting table forms and Hou Jun-ming's (侯俊明) wheelbarrow full of heads. The drawings all portray human figures, or else portions of the human body. Figures are generic and in no way individualized. Sexual and reproductive organs and acts are often emphasized. And lots of violence is done to the human body -- it is decapitated, amputated, disemboweled, rearranged, inverted (outside to in) and sometimes just shown as labyrinths of sinews, intestines and other anthropomorphic forms. A lot of it is pretty gross.

And in the case of at least four artists -- Yao, Hou, Lee Jun-yang (李俊陽) and Hung-yi (洪易) -- all this anonymous diabolical anatomy is juxtaposed against traditional Chinese ideas -- which is basically what strains of new, contested morality are overturning or casting aside.

Sex is probably the most obvious example of a source of guilt that springs from traditional values, while at the same time becoming near ubiquitous in a society that's historically freer, more mobile and more anonymous. On paper, these feelings come out as distorted sexual bodies portrayed with classical Chinese overtones: Hung creates carnivals of sexual humanity with title's like Buddha and Ta Tung (大同, Sun Yat Sen's concept of "Great Equality"); Yao borrows classical Chinese styles of gold leaf and ink line drawing in his sexually barbed works; and Lee defaces puppet heads from Chinese puppet theatre.