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Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Shayne Phua, The Ornamented Knife confronts the Pure, Unadorned Moon, 2024 Image courtesy of the Artist. Photography by Jon Blu.
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Shayne Phua, The Ornamented Knife confronts the Pure, Unadorned Moon, 2024 Image courtesy of the Artist. Photography by Jon Blu.
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Shayne Phua, The Ornamented Knife confronts the Pure, Unadorned Moon, 2024 Image courtesy of the Artist. Photography by Jon Blu.
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Shayne Phua, The Ornamented Knife confronts the Pure, Unadorned Moon, 2024 Image courtesy of the Artist. Photography by Jon Blu.

Shayne Phua

The Ornamented Knife confronts the Pure, Unadorned Moon, 2024
Ceramic with fountain pump and pipe, tassels, and silver gilding
22 x 27.5 x 15 cm
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One of several fountains in the current exhibition, this work features a moon jar pierced through with a blade dubbed an eunjangdo. It was inspired, Phua notes, by the South...
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One of several fountains in the current exhibition, this work features a moon jar pierced through with a blade dubbed an eunjangdo. It was inspired, Phua notes, by the South Korean film, Homme Fatale (2019). The moon jar is a traditional Korean vessel, typically cast from white porcelain and asymmetrical in its top and bottom halves, that appeared during the Joseon dynasty. The moniker, a twentieth-century coinage, comes from its hue and shape. The moon jar became popular in Korea for its supposed embodiment of neo-Confucian values; its pristine appearance symbolized purity, and its unadorned surfaces, a sense of restraint. The eunjangdo is a silver knife carried or worn by women as an emblem of chastity (for maidens) and fidelity (for married women), and used in the service of self-defence or even suicide, if necessary. The meeting of the two objects in a violent encounter – one a signifier of morality, the other a weapon of self-sacrifice – suggests the turning of the pre-modern ideal of female virtue, which privileged death over the loss of chastity, on itself. The puncturing of the jar may be understood as an act of aggression against neo-Confucian strictures, a feminist reaction to historical power asymmetries.
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A roast of Asian nine tails topped with broken femur and bile, accompanied by more curious ingredients, 20 July – 1 September 2024, Yeo Workshop, Singapore

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