Shen Yuan’s Speechless ‘Tongues’: Speaking out beyond language barriers

Abstract

This paper considers a series of installation works made by Paris-based Chinese artist Shen Yuan, which take the form of the human tongue, a symbol of both flesh and language. Shen moved to Paris in 1990. Suddenly, her mother tongue became useless and the language in her adopted country was nothing more than incomprehensible noise. Constructed from seemingly trivial, unremarkable everyday materials, such as ice, knives and old clothes, these wordless ‘tongues’, which emanate illegible ‘voices’, indicate her struggles with verbal inarticulacy, intimately tied to her sense of isolation and uprootedness as an immigrant residing in a foreign cultural context. With her works, Shen reveals the limited ability of language in speaking out about one’s experience and identity in the situation of diaspora and transcultural exchange. This paper draws on Marsha Meskimmon’s conception of ‘dual economies of response’, which investigates the potential of art in crossing between cultural, linguistic and social boundaries through two modes of responses from viewers—the immediate sensory, physical response to the material body of the art object and the ethical response to the moral entreaty conveyed through the artwork. This paper examines how Shen’s works, via their peculiar, affective material construction, evoke viewers’ bodily, sensory and psychical engagement, communicating her experience of inhabiting and negotiating an unfamiliar foreign living environment beyond cultural and language barriers; and in what ways her artworks might construct an interactive space for viewers to imagine, encounter and respond to the life of other people without negating possible conflicts and disparities.