The article is from the WeChat public account: made (ID: xingshu100) , author: Li Ying, from the title figure: “Cinderella”
Monika Lin is a mixed-race Chinese artist whose father is Chinese and mother is Swiss. Born in New York, she returned to her father’s homeland, China, after a few twists and turns, and stayed there for more than ten years.
Cross-cultural and inter-racial identity and life experience made her very sensitive to the topic of race, skin color and gender, and deeply observed the cultural differences and stereotypes hidden in many social phenomena. s reason.
In this lecture, Monika always wanted to evoke the possibility of everyone trying to make their own voice, to find the fairy tale that you most want to shape deep inside.
Monika Lin Assistant Professor of Art and Head of Art Discipline, New York University, Shanghai
Fairy tales are creating and deepening our stereotypes in the fields of gender, physical sex, economy, and culture, and these stereotypes do not need to exist. The stories of such stereotypes have become a part of our daily lives. They exist widely in our advertisements, movies … It can be said that they are almost everywhere.
Stiffness common in life
We often see in these stories: men are smart, and women just need to be beautiful. This stereotype also affects our education, with more men than women in science.
These fairy tales do not reflect my dreams
I like stories, fairy tales, folk tales, historical stories, family history, and even lies in good faith. I always remember the fairy tales that my mother told me, and these stories gave me infinite imagination. But I like the communication space and the bond that it creates between me and my mother more than the story itself.
Monika makes the scene of Remix conference in 2019
When I was young, my mother and I often talked about the fairy tales she told. She would answer all my doubts: Why does the story end like this? Why is the heroine’s hair blond?
But as I get older, I feel more and more uneasy about these stories, because I realize that those fairy tales have nothing to do with me, they do n’t integrate me in any way, they do n’t reflect my dreams And hope, they are here to tell me how I should behave, how I look like, who I should marry, and I should marry.
Disney’s fairy tale heroines
In fact, many stories originate from women. In the past, women were cooking in the kitchen, working in the fields, and cleaning the house, and they used communication stories as part of daily life. These stories are the way they use to overcome difficulties in life, they talk about the cruelty in their world, they give each other hope and comfort, and through this, they create a space for imagination, because only in imagination are they Have more possibilities.
When women tell these stories, their children will be listening around, and slowly these children also begin to organize these stories, and fairy tales enter their daily lives. Story is a power in public space, a power to create personal identity, and many people soon realize it. So the Brothers Grimm in Germany decided to collect these stories, one of the reasons is that as a record of their cultural history and traditions, they hope that these stories will not disappear and that these stories will be kept forever.
Brothers Grimm compiles and compiles fairy tales
However, there is a darker motivation. They see the power of the story. The story is a way to control behavior. They knock from door to door, sit down, listen to women and children, and record. A lot of stories.
Every story has many versions that reflect the specific cultural characteristics of the place where they originated. But when the brothers wrote the story, they tried to find a universal version of all the stories in order to educate the children and control their behavior. They separated gender roles: girls should do these behaviors, boys should do these behaviors, girls wear this kind of clothes, boys are strong, girls should listen …
Monika makes the scene of Remix conference in 2019
In the process of collecting stories, they also did another thing, comparing these many different versions of stories and adapting them into a single version of the story. They redefined those stories, set a certain version for each type of story, removed the details of different cultures, removed the possibility of change, and removed those stories that can reflect reality. section.
Cinderella actually had 355 versions
We are all familiar with the story of Cinderella. at 1New ways of looking at our lives and finding the value of our own existence in the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell our children, the stories we tell ourselves.
This is a fairy tale painting that Monika personally likes. The princess rides a horse with a sword to fight the dragon
So, what kind of fairy tale do you want to create?
The article is from the WeChat public account: made (ID: xingshu100) author: Li Ying