“Uglier and Uglier” is a 7 hours long video filmed by Chinese artists Song Ta in 2012. Song Ta filmed passing women in a university without their consent and ranked them from “the most attractive” to “the unforgiving”. This art piece raised a firestorm on the Chinese internet and OCAT, the art gallery which exhibited this art piece has already withdrawn it and apologized for their “careless evaluation”.
This work, and all the social reactions triggered by it, also raise a firestorm in my mind and force me to think over contemporary art and conceptual art. Let me analyze this artwork first, and try to understand why Song Ta created this, and why he did it in an offensive, aggressive and disrespectful way. Looking at the content of the video, Song Ta chose a very brutal and naked way to expose the issue of appearance ranking and privacy, both of which are happening all the time in any corner of the world, to the public. We have to admit that, shooting women without consent, ranking them from the most beautiful to most ugly, posting the video in an art gallery to display, is provoking. I felt disgusting because he just reveal the evil nature of human beings by doing this, and in an illegal way. It hurt not only just the women in the video but also all the female groups in society. So why he did this? Is he a bad person who materializes females? And why OCAT decided to exhibit this work?
I tried hard to convinced myself that it is a work with deep meaning, revealing the social status of females, appearance disrespect, and privacy leak. The first reason I explain for Song Ta is that he had to choose this provoking way of sarcasm so that his voice could be heard by the public even though it would hurt others, and he had prophesied everything may happen after the exhibition of his work, including the anger of the society, especially of the female group. He even exaggerated his disrespect and attack through the interview with BIE(Vice in China). With my assumption, video, interview, exhibition, his public speaking, online discussion, public attitudes’ shift, and even the public internet attacks on Song Ta himself, can be seen as a series of performance art about feminism progress in China. I almost succeeded in persuading myself to believe this is a real art piece and forgive Song Ta’s guilt for hurting those women. But I questioned myself at the end, is he really who I think he is? Whether this work is intentional or just pure evil? What is more is that he indeed violated the law and hurt people. Can art only be a symbol of beauty and goodness? Should the art of evil exist?
I still have no answer to those questions. My concentration gradually moved to “what is art”, “art and goodness” and “the relation between art and law”. I wish to bring up this piece(maybe it is not art at all) and discuss this.
Reference: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/song-ta-uglier-and-uglier-art-intl-hnk/index.html
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