The engine at the core of Victorian culture resembles its own science fiction: an impossibility drive, powered by the friction of the irreconcilable contradictions between all its cultural forms, social strata, ideas, beliefs and realities. Working in and between this multiplicity of cultural forms and voices, the artists in ‘New Victorians’ engage with the grotesque, death and life, otherness and identity.
While all this sounds messy, the works shown in the elegant space of the University art gallery are exemplars of decorum. Finely made, modestly sized and with few of the works breaking out of the containment of box or frame, this feels like a very quiet, well behaved exhibition. Yet up close these works speak, obliquely, cunningly and subversively of those things normally unutterable in Victorian speech.
Liyen Chong embroiders her own hair into small, exquisite canvases of skeletal figures and frames resembling book title pages of the kind that held moral aphorisms. A traditional Chinese craft, this technique recalls Victorian commemorative hair jewellery and the fetishisation of women’s hair as a substitute for their sexuality. Hair held and stitched down produces a feeling of visceral unease, but the skeletons are slyly comic. The Oriental dragon sporting almost unnoticed in the curlicued border of Verso, possible means ending, hints at other truths outside of the frame.
Shadowy identities move through Emma van Leest’s miniature dramas of the exotic. Constructed of paper cuts stepped back inside a glass display box, the effect is of looking through an elaborate stage set or a series of Indian screens. Saffron orange and sprinkled with glitter, they embody the lure of the exotic other that India held for the Victorians. Within, there is