by ANDREE WESCHLER (FRANCE) and CHUA KA-INN (SINGAPORE)

It started with collaboration between two artists and the landscape, a dialogue among the three elements. Having come from two very different environments, it was their first visit to the Kangnung landscape. Thus begins the communication between nature and human experience.
The intention of the artwork was to extract a line from the landscape, to make simply a drawing, adding or erasing. They started to rework the original beauty of nature, changing the form of the field of dried autumn flowers, according to the way the nature guides them. The flowers, the most beautiful part of the plant, were stripped bare, revealing only the once hidden thin dried stalks, stems painted red.
As the work progresses, perceptions became varied and interchangeable. New experiences, discoveries and visions became important in the process of creating an artwork out of nature.
The idea was to create a sexual landscape, an exchange of nature with human nature. Where the beauty of the nature invokes in our senses a feeling of sensual desire, a desire to be one with nature, sexuality, a most basic pure form of human nature, is invoked in the landscape.

The Hairy Virgin is a true story of a girl whose entire body was covered with hair. She was introduced to the King Charles the 4th, Emperor and King.

In his book “Histoires Prodigieuses”, Pierre Boaistuau explains that during her pregnancy, the mother of the Hairy Virgin had seen a statue of Saint John that was covered with animal fur. With the power of her imagination, the mother “transferred” the hair onto the body of her forthcoming baby. The maternal imagination has the power to shape the progeny, it is called the “monstrous imagination”.

“A hairy virgin was shown completely covered with hair like a bear; she was born thus deformed and hideous because her mother had gazed too intensely upon an effigy of St John dressed in animal skins which hung at the foot of her bed when she conceived.

It is certain that these monstrous creatures most often are the consequence of divine judgment, justice, punishment, and curse; horrified by their sin, God allows [women] to produce such abominations because they hurl themselves forward indifferently, like savage beasts that only follow their appetites, with no consideration of age, place, time, and the other laws established by Nature”

Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses, 1560