Images courtesy of the blog, Yuencheeling.art-her.com
Yuen Chee Ling has died at age 65, but her art, celebrating Women with a capital “W”, in all its good-natured simplicity and other-worldly complexities, lives on.
Yuen Chee Ling held steadfast to the ideal of Woman – what it takes to be a Woman, the fount of infinite love, her innate beauty and appearance, her wiles and innocence, her strengths and vulnerability… and her mystique. She represents the Woman as the symbolic bedrock at the crossroads of changes, embodying core traditional values in the face of modernity and coping with her own vicissitudes of life.
Hers is the woman who is thinking, working (doing), seeing, feeling and caring (about and for); one who is perennially balancing the demands of career (in her case, her art and activism in promoting art), family (her own, her parents and her in-laws) and friends.
Hers is the Asian Woman, without ethnic or cultural specificities and hovering in the suburbs of presence, what Yoko Ariska describes as an “invisibility” in her paper, Asian Women: Invisibility, Locations and Claims to Philosophy, selfie-ing stereotypes like docile, submissive, withdrawn, polite, deferential and straitjacketed to the status quo.
