Tender is the Flesh (2025) engages with ideas of skin as both surface and material agency: a site where identity, memory, and trauma are inscribed, but also where discomfort, estrangement, and instability emerge. While I continue to explore the intimate relationship between skin and identity, my practice is increasingly concerned with broader, more abstract states of the body, where wounds, scars, and fragments of flesh are not only markers of individuality but also material encounters with the abject, the grotesque, and the unstable.
Through investigating the use of liquid latex, I have constructed skin-like surfaces which are stretched and layered across walls, hooks, and found objects: evoking both the feel of organic tissue and medical specimens. These installations will incorporate surgical and sterile atmospheres, juxtaposing comfort with disgust, the domestic with the clinical, and the familiar with the uncanny. Through pigments, tattoo machinery, and other processes of inscription, I will produce textured surfaces reminiscent of a variation of patterns found on the human skin that simultaneously recall healing and injury, repair and violation.
My intention was to create a body of work that destabilizes fixed notions of identity by emphasizing ambiguous states where the organic (latex as the substitute for skin) and artificial (incorporation of found objects and furniture) coexist: creating simultaneously contrasting states such as comfort and horror, as well as intimacy and alienation. Rather than presenting clear narratives, I aim to create environments that provoke unease, curiosity, and reflection, where the surface of the body becomes a threshold between vulnerability, materiality, and abjection.
Jennifer Wang (b. 2004, China) is a multi-media artist currently in her last year of a Bachelors of Fine Arts (Painting) degree at RMIT University. She has stepped into the field of more contemporary approaches to her practice, exploring identity, corporeality, and abjection using liquid latex. Through sculptural installation and material investigations, she aims to create an environment where latex operates as a surrogate skin: protective yet permeable, alluring yet abject. The key belief behind her practice is that identity is never fixed but rather exists in a constant state of transformation. Jennifer’s practice reclaims vulnerability as empowerment but also challenging the expectations of permanence in not just art, but our bodies.
