Growing her own work, photographing it, or attaching it to others, the Chinese artist is almost in love with her own abjection
This is an invitation-only show. It’s tucked away at the back of the gallery’s main space; to get to it, you are led through two thick curtains behind a ‘Staff Only’ sign and hand in your phones and cameras as if you’re at a Berlin nightclub. There’s a similar idea of exclusivity at work here, but more as a means of keeping the casual passersby away from a series of works by Chinese artist Hu Jiayi, whose 18 photographs mainly show her pubic hair, either pictured in or attached to the (mostly) black-and-white compositions. On one wall of the dim maroon space hang seven unframed closeup photographs of Hu’s naked groin (Her Mustache, 2024). Her pubic hair is thick, deliberately styled into sharply pointed locks to look like the titular facial feature, curving upward like a devil’s horns. In one, Hu’s hand wraps around a clump of hair shaped like an imaginary phallus that she’s stimulating. Humorous, sarcastic, unabashed and oblivious to taboos, Hu is almost in love with her own abjection and the part of her body often deemed gross, improper and horrible.
Hu’s show would easily be tagged as ‘pornographic’ were it open to the general public. But the works on view go beyond breaking taboos or embracing the female body. In Dali’s Mustache (2017–22), nine ornately framed replicas of iconic portraits of Salvador Dalí show the artist staring into the camera with his trademark moustache, which, upon a closer look, is revealed to be styled from real pubic hair. Attached carefully in the place of – and masked as – Dalí’s handlebars, they are coarse and unruly, unequivocally sticking out from the picture’s flatness. In the wall text, an imaginary dialogue unfolds between the artist and Dalí, in which Hu explains to the Surrealist her choice of picking his moustache to emulate, rather than, say, Stalin’s, as ‘the cost is too high’ to parrot the facial hair of the political leader (she references the supposed fate of Yevsei Lubytskyi, one of Stalin’s body doubles, cast into a gulag in 1949 for ‘damaging the leader’s image’ after having dressed as Stalin). Hu couldn’t borrow from the more powerful and provocative moustaches, so she picked an easier fight. Dalí’s moustache is lighthearted, eccentric and not politically charged. Dalí, per the dialogue, doesn’t mind: ‘My joy is in knowing you’ve glued pubic hair to my upper lip’. What’s at stake, then, seems to be the political power that she cannot afford to desecrate, and her pubic-hair-turned-moustaches allude to a reality where masculinity and political power intertwines – a reality she and her Chinese audience have to live through.
The fact that Hu was born in Xinjiang and is ethnically Han adds another layer of geopolitical complication. In the only colour photograph on view, Juejiang Maimaiti (The Resolute Muhammad, 2020), Hu wears a doppa (Uyghur skullcap) and a large, thick beard, and poses regally in an extravagant living room with the decorative clichés of a well-appointed Uyghur home: gold and silver draperies, intricate Persianate rugs and a tableful of fruits, nuts, Uyghur bread and beer. She sits cross-legged on her glorious throne, her lips tilted upward, looking playful. Starting in 2017, the Chinese government officially implemented a policy dubbed the ‘counter-extremism act’ that restricted facial hair for members of the Muslim community. During the pandemic, such restrictions were momentarily neglected, allowing Hu to walk around Ürümqi with a big beard on her face. For a young girl of Han ethnicity, this would be against both tradition and law. But she casually photographs herself, disrupting the ethnic, gendered and political lines involved.
Her Mustache at Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, 12 September – 11 October
From the Winter 2024 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
