One Past 5:14

by Amy Meng

My practice emerges out of a fascination with kawaii culture (the culture of cuteness prevalent in East Asia) and psychoanalysis. I am especially invested in certain theories of Klein, Lacan and Kristeva, they facilitate my investigations into the ambivalent nature of issues such as infantilisation, fetish, domesticity, and their impact on the individual and collective mind. 

Drawing influences from manga and anime, I create personas and narratives in order to construct surrogates. My characters represent the inner experience of those who are often wandering along the periphery of a phallocentric social fabric. They embody both object and subject, infant and adult, in a world where reality and fantasy collide. 

At the same time, I incorporate hobby craft and household materials as a means to subvert the notion of “home as safe haven”. Through repetitive labor, I produce works which reflect on the home as a liminal space which feeds both comfort and conflict, intimacy and abjection. This allows myself to stitch together the actions of a house wife, and the mindset of an otaku (an agoraphobic individual who shuns social interaction and is usually obsessed with video games or anime). 

Instead of offering definite answers, I strive to destabilize and obscure the binaries and preconceptions dominant in current society, creating works which are simultaneously cute and perverse, uncanny and humorous, naïve and libidinal.