Dutch Wife
(2017⁠–⁠2022)

I investigate how history manifested in objects can enable us to then use the plasticity of time embedded within them. The sequence of historicity found in objects is then subsequently relocated into now and the future and attains its openness, allowing us to commune with it. An example of this is my project Dutch Wife (2018/2022), featuring an unknown object in the Netherlands but well known as a guiling in Indonesia, created by Dutch colonial history. Zhúfūrén,Yale, trúc phu nhân, 죽부인, kawil, hpaat lone, guling; are all names of this object in Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Pilipiness, Burmese, Indonesian. But its original name is Dutch Wife. The name came from the Dutch occupation of Indonesia and it connotes colonial Indonesian women. This one mundane object maps the historical traces and oppressed figures of women in Asian countries. The object is made out of bamboo and weaved into a human sized pillow and you hug it when in your bed in the darkness of sweltering nights to help ventilate your body. I traced the provenance of the object from Korea to Indonesia and to the Netherlands. After two years of research, the work oversaw the return of this object and its bodily gesture to the Netherlands. Through the performativity of remaking, with local Indonesian craftsman communities in Sumedang, Java, and collecting the ghost stories of the object, my object draws the memories of objectified Asian female bodies by crossing colonial histories and frontiers. I investigated the notion of “embracement” as a pattern for remedying this colonial object by transforming, reversing the object’s function, and I transformed the object’s bodily position from being hugged and being occupied to hugging and embracing. Changing the user’s form of the object was my artistic methodology to emancipate its historical oppressive formation that is described in the original object. From this work I started to think about gestures of objects and objectified beings which I then developed further.

In this sculptural installation, I explored the multi-layered stories and histories surrounding the guiling, a long, tube-shaped human-sized cushion. In bed, people wrap their arms and legs around the cushion to stay in a relaxed sleeping position. Originally made from rattan or braided bamboo, their open structure also allows for ventilation in warm and humid climates. During the Dutch colonial occupation of Indonesia, British traders used the mocking term “Dutch Wife” for the guiling—raising the problematic subject of colonists seeking female companionship. The guiling merges everyday habits with traditional and contemporary crafts and colonial references, and i am interested in the guiling’s potential when placed in the environment of a contemporary art space.

I made this installation using a series of elongated knitted tubes that ‘embraces’ an original guiling. It is a gesture of softness and warmth, evoking the feeling of a caring embrace. The re-appropriation of the guiling is my attempt to reclaim a dispossessed and displaced object with the aim of healing colonial trauma. The cartography map woven into the body of the object represents a landscape of hidden narratives.