The Smallest Gallery in Soho is delighted to present artist Sophie Teh with her work Objects of Desire. The exhibition consists of two suspended, rotating painted fabric sculptures.
The Smallest Gallery in Soho is a short walk from Chinatown where restaurants customarily display food in windows, hung on hooks to advertise their freshness. Teh uses this as a starting point, employing the sausage, a traditional Chinese fast food, but itself a visually suggestive form. She draws analogies between the conspicuously suggestive form and painted motifs with issues of fetishism and objectification of the Asian female. On a formal level, the work invites onlookers to re-examine cultural perceptions due to social conditioning.
Teh recognises that the sausage’s form, and the act of its consumption is loaded with innuendo and uses our visual relationship with it to address the perception of the Asian female as hypersexualised to the Western gaze. The personal story of the Asian female is largely invisible, yet physically, she is often seen as a symbol of eroticism and an object to fulfil fantasies. Much like how the hanging food in restaurant windows promises to fulfil an urge in our bellies. This assertion is further tested through the embellishment of the sculptures with glitter and lighting.
Objects of Desire, 2021
Fabric paint on canvas, polyester filler, nylon thread, glitter, rotary motors, 170cmx210cm
About the Artist
Sophie Teh’s art plays with abstract and figurative themes, depicting familiar objects in unexpected ways. Her work references her South-East Asian Chinese background and explores how cultural conditioning and personal memories influence how we perceive and react to visual stimuli.
As part of Teh’s artistic investigation, she paints from personal experiences. Drawing from the ‘otherness’ of her Malaysian Chinese roots, Teh’s work mines this cultural tension to generate work that challenges racial and cultural stereotypes.
The artist manipulates the scale of familiar forms and assigns patterns and motifs to ignite associations and emotions in the viewer. She believes that we cognitively and perceptually mesh with painting, and that there is a mutual activation. The resulting experience of this is generative and pushes viewers towards an understanding of their experiences.
Teh was born in Ipoh, Malaysia and currently lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.
