Ming-Miao Ko

Handle with Care 2024

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Humans invent tools, implements, and instruments, and these objects can become 'subjects’—leading, provoking, and triggering our wonder and curiosity, even indicating to us how to treat them. By objectifying the human body, such tools become associated with the realm of ritual, consecration, prayer, and magic. The 'handle' in my works means 'to deal with'; it also represents and interrogates how the body is handled as a tool, a means, or/and an extension from the subject to an object, from human to non-human, and from nature to culture.

 

This series implies and questions the objectification (reification) and dehumanisation under the 'given meanings' of the body by casting and connecting different body parts (male and female genitalia, ear, umbilicus, …) and objects from nature and artificiality (egg, shell, seed, tail, bone, handle, light bulb, pipe,…). Those are referring to hybridity, becoming, gender fluidity, sexuality, and reproduction. The series keeps evolving with mirroring, integrating, corresponding, and generating...from seeing the body as a diverse and relational assemblage.  It contests and transforms the dichotomous view of the world.

 

Deriving from the making process is an ongoing dialectical query about the presentation and representation of 'the body'. Nevertheless, it equally embodies a tribute to the life cycle beyond male, female, and androgyny, echoes the complex meaning of the body has to be 'handled carefully'—'Handle with Care'.