The Polite Fictions series: manipulated rephotography of ceramic portraits from headstones in St. Michael’s Cemetery, Hong Kong.
These works attempt to understand the transformations of the private spaces of an individual’s sentiment into the public space….conflicts between domesticity and publicity, citizenry and privacy, agenda and gender politics, information and control, patriotism and dissent and the relation of these conflicts to their impacts on those who use them.
It is a play on the ways the expressive body discloses cultural codes, and cultural codes shape the perceptive body, the different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries, specifically within high context societies such as China or Japan. These cultures dislike direct confrontation, and for the most part avoid expressing a clear “no.” Evasion and inaccuracy are preferred in order to keep appearances pleasant. Polite fictions are created: social scenarios in which all participants are aware of the truth but in order to avoid conflict or embarrassment choose an alternative version of the truth.
