Artist Lith Ng Yee Leng encapsulates the gritty, ‘dirty’ aspects of owning a vagina - the bleeding, the pain, the excretion of various fluids - with sculptural resin as her medium of choice. Ng’s entire show was built around the growing pains of womanhood, through which she wanted to embrace all things that were deemed “gross”. This made for a very intimate body of work that would definitely touch certain members of the audience.
As a viewer, her work without a doubt gave me a very visceral experience. Perhaps it’s my haemophobia at play but the bloody visuals prevalent in the show definitely made my knees feel a little jelly-like. Her display, Everyday a Part of Me Dies With Time, which featured a large resin rectangle with an abstract arrangement of henna to mimic blood splattered on bathroom tiles, was the first thing to catch my eye in the entire exhibition, and not only because of its large size. In the formalist sense, the arrangement of the dotted streaks of henna in an almost uniformed flow is undoubtedly pleasing to the eye. Blood on bathroom tiles are a familiar sight to the monthly bleeder, and I think she managed to portray it in a way that immediately reminds the knowing viewer of the less-than-pleasant event. Her play on the theme of bleeding also makes me think of miscarriages that women have had to endure, perhaps alone in the shower.
In a smaller room, her display entitled “The Instinctive Playground is The Only Luxury I Dream Of” was also a standout. It consisted of resin moulded in condoms with synthetic pearls dangling from metal chains on a metal clothes rack. Meant to represent ovarian cysts and fibroids, the work made me think of how these very common physical ailments are rarely openly discussed. Her use of chains came across to me as a reminder that at the end of the day, we are chained to our bodies and every possible complication that comes with being human . It also made me think about how an entire faction of society is chained to these possible health complications merely because of the genitalia we were born with.
