FAIRY TALES

We call western people’s fixed notion or a distorted view toward the East ‘Orientalism,’ which originated from the cultural prejudice in the West, and ‘Occidentalism is a comparative notion which makes a contrast with Orientalism. E. Said formerly criticized that both are nothing but false images that see other cultures from an ethnocentric viewpoint and this tendency has justified the western imperialists’ invasion against the East.
From a historical or social point of view, the difference of culture and language has been one of the most important standards that make a distinction between various social classes. Additionally, a war is one of the most significant factors that enable us to grasp the essence of the world history, and the social classes became more differentiated in this ‘weak-to-the-wall kind of society’ caused by the wars. It was the age of imperialism that accelerated this law of the jungle by force in a full scale.
H. Spencer’s ‘Social Darwinism’ is nothing other than the ideology that justified imperialism of ‘the law of jungle.’’ This imperialism ultimately brought about Orientalism that the West as a winner will understand the East as a loser from its prejudiced point of view.
Furthermore, this historical and cultural prejudice caused another prejudice against social positions in capitalist societies, transmitted from generation to generation by education or other social conventions. The prejudice against an Oriental male in the western society has been shown to me as an utmost form such as the feel of alienation or the chaos of identity. In other words, these emotions of mine are related to the prejudice mentioned above and personal worries which is due to it.
From my point of view, this prejudiced notion of the West is the most highlighted particularly in the western portraits. All the western portraits that I have observed are drawn by oil painting, and all the persons in the pictures seem to be described, following the direction that their superiority and tough spirits are maximized. For example, the portraits of the King Henry VIII or the Queen Elizabeth I that I saw are the ones that described the shapes of the aggressive people who had made a big contribution to building ‘the great England.’ Here I think that the skill of oil painting and the images of the people described by it are two essential factors that make it possible for me to approach the shape of the West because these points are so western that they are hardly shown in the eastern culture. In other words, oil painting has not been used in the eastern culture, and a typical eastern portrait drawn by water painting does not describe a person as an aggressive image. Thus, I have applied this western painting method to my photographic works in order to express my emotions of ‘alienation and prejudice’ in the world of my art. For instance, some distinctive features such as the strong color contrast, composition, the pose of the person and the background of the time which are shown in the one of my works, ‘Existing in Costume 1’ were inspired by these traditional English portraits.
From now on, I intend to seek these notions from the stories of the heroes or the heroines in the traditional western fairy tales, as a link in a chain of the efforts that aim at developing my works more than ever. In other words, in the first half of my activities, though the motives used in my works were from history, those in the second half will be based on traditional western fairy tales. It means, although the philosophy in my works will be the same, I will pursue the materials for expressing my emotions in another place. Furthermore, it indirectly exposes that the feelings of ‘alienation and prejudice’ that I have coherently claimed exist everywhere in the western society.
I think that both history and fairy tales share a common point with each other in that they lead their readers to accept a fixed conclusion or thought. In other words, ‘describing the history as it used to be’ which had been claimed by L. Ranke in the 19th century became turned out to be false, and history is nothing but a story which describes ‘a historian and his facts’ as what E. H. Carr claimed. Thus, describing history in present age goes to the direction that denies a historian’s ‘grand narrative’ like what J. Derrida claimed by his notion of ‘deconstruction.’
From this viewpoint, I claim that narrating a fairy tale is quite similar to describing history in that it tends to unwittingly infuse a fixed virtue or a formed frame of thought to the readers who experience it. Therefore, for me to convert the source of my motives from history to fairy tales does not break the consistency of the philosophy in my works.
I have examined some representative western fairy tales for my new activity; for example, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast and so on. What I found in them is there are definite social classes in these stories, and all of them contain tacit messages that the weak should obey the order designed by the strong in order to enjoy happiness. This point corresponds to the historical fact that the powerful western countries intended to strengthen and solidify their regime in the conquered countries by indoctrinating their governing ideology to those whom they ruled. Thus, on the extension of my working activities in the first half, I am to reinterpret these notions hidden in the western fairy tales and use them as the important motives for my works in the second half.
By Chan-Hyo Bae