ABSTRACT
Liliana Porter photographic vignettes star mass-produced objects she has collected from junk shops, flea markets, and "odd places" since the 1960s. This chapter examines a set of artists that span across generations, cultures, subjective identifications and aesthetics. The piece uniting all of them is that each arrived at the process of constructing spaces—literally as well as metaphorically— as a vehicle for framing and realizing various overlapping questions and concerns regarding gender, sexuality. The chapter also examines the artists who in turn examine questions provoked from within these subject positions. In her series Fairy Tales, Miwa Yanagi sought to bring the darkness of well-known fairy tales and their characters back into artists’ line of sight, re-arranging and complicating their understanding of heroine and villain in the process. The work of Wang Ningde is insistently minimalist and spare. The photographs emphasize nuance in posing, expression, gesture and details in props, costuming and casting through the genre of tableau.
