Perfect Housewife, 2018, installations, performance
Perfect Housewife is a toolkit customized for a fictional role assigned by the artist to herself.
It includes a series of installations with a performance. In the toolkit, Yihan designed four machines for this imaginary character, accompanied by a user manual which is a performance to explain their ‘perfect usage’.
‘Chopping machine’ helps her to avoid the strong smell of onions.
‘Gentle baby tapper’ assists her to calm the baby to sleep and allows her to continue playing on the phone.
‘Brilliant iron cooker’ makes cooking easier and interesting.
‘Good machine’ encourages her and other machines on finishing the housework.
The nature that this ‘perfect role’ does not exist. In the performance, the artist tries to make everything perfect as a housewife and pretend that everything is under control. In this project, the role of ‘housewife’ is an over -exaggerated symbol. Through the clumsy, repetitive, strange, and even violent mechanical movements of these imperfect machines, the phenomenon that Yihan wants to examine here is the entrenched ideas about woman’s household labor in the traditional families, and the pressures from society and family faced by the women in the context of new era China.
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Perfect Housewife is a toolkit customized for a fictional role assigned by the artist to herself.
It includes a series of installations with a performance. In the toolkit, Yihan designed four machines for this imaginary character, accompanied by a user manual which is a performance to explain their ‘perfect usage’.
‘Chopping machine’ helps her to avoid the strong smell of onions.
‘Gentle baby tapper’ assists her to calm the baby to sleep and allows her to continue playing on the phone.
‘Brilliant iron cooker’ makes cooking easier and interesting.
‘Good machine’ encourages her and other machines on finishing the housework.
The nature that this ‘perfect role’ does not exist. In the performance, the artist tries to make everything perfect as a housewife and pretend that everything is under control. In this project, the role of ‘housewife’ is an over -exaggerated symbol. Through the clumsy, repetitive, strange, and even violent mechanical movements of these imperfect machines, the phenomenon that Yihan wants to examine here is the entrenched ideas about woman’s household labor in the traditional families, and the pressures from society and family faced by the women in the context of new era China.
