My Body Flows with Natural Red Paint and Contraceptive and Aphrodisiac are a performative, experimental film installation exploring female embodied experience through blood, which is often tied to taboos, trauma, shame and silence. This project aligns with Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota’s 1974 Video poem, which offers a powerful feminist reworking of Descartes’ famous philosophical statement. She says: “Man thinks, ‘I think, therefore I am’, but a woman feels, ‘I bleed, therefore I am’.” What if emotions and sensations are also a form of knowledge? How might female embodied experience be understood through sensations, emotions, and associations?
In this project, I use pomegranate juice instead of real blood. In traditional Chinese painting and wedding rites, the pomegranate is like a women’s womb with its numerous seeds symbolizing the blessing to have many children. Refer to ancient Greco-Roman and medieval medical texts, the pomegranate was paradoxically described as both a contraceptive and an aphrodisiac. This contradiction between preventing and encouraging conception further deepens its association with reproduction, desire, and death. Against this background, I propose that blood (symbolised by pomegranate juice) naturally flows within and is stored by the female body. It is not external, but interior and ordinary. A woman’s body is inherently connected to ‘blood’, in other words, to fertility, menstruation, desire, pain, and danger.
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The video installations are presented behind a door and a wall. Consisting of three peepholes in the exhibition, which require viewers to stretch upward or bend down, implicating their bodies in the act of looking and placing them in a complicit position. The video consists of close-up footage that focuses on the interaction between ‘blood’ and skin, evoking visceral and auditory reactions. The abstract and unknown scenes provoke contemplation. The film’s soundscape alternates between the sound of dripping water and my voice in my mother togue. Together, they create a tension between peace and violence, tenderness and discomfort. As fleeting scenes and fragmented rhythms continually shift perception, moments of shock give way to curiosity, and contradiction becomes the space where meaning emerges.
Yao Tong 童瑶 (b.2003, Guangdong, China) is a lens-based artist and student studying at RMIT’s School of Art, Fine Art: Video and Sound studio. She was born under China’s one-child policy, which limited most families to a single child between 1979 and 2015. As an accidentally born second child, her parents were required to pay a fine of 80,000 CNY in order to register her household status. This origin story underpins her ongoing exploration of self-identity and value. Working across cameraless photography, instant photography, installations, sculptures, videos, and performances, she examines how images mediate intimate narratives. Her art is deeply influenced by her embodied experience.