By: Kahyun Lee
A body emerges from a pond in a cave crowded with bulbous rocks. She ascends a staircase suspended in the air, at the top of which glows a luminous sculpture. The emergence from water, the columns reminiscent of ancient temples, and the female figure poised in contrapposto all point to a familiar story: Aphrodite or her Roman counterpart, Venus. The goddess of beauty and love has been one of the most enduring subjects in Western art. Its history traces back to the fourth century BCE, when Aphrodite of Knidos became the first known female nude sculpture. The ancient Greek myth tells that the goddess was born fully-grown from the sea and arrived ashore on a scallop. Aphrodite became the archetype of beauty, representing the idealised female body reiterated through centuries.
Photo Courtesy: Shaoyu Ba (Unheard Body, Xilichen Hua, 2025, Exhibition View of ‘Stick On the Collage’, 1215 Gallery, Montreal, Canada.)
In Xilichen Hua’s single-channel video Unheard Body, the artist unveils the sounds of a silent archetype. Whilst the historical depictions of Venus often invited worship, admiration, and gaze in silence, Hua’s Venus looks right back at those who stand before her. The gaze is reversed. “My body is not mine alone. It is glossified and molded by centuries of gaze,” she exposes. Her voice rolls through the chamber. “In this space, I resist being simply a spectacle”, declares Venus.
Hua’s Venus is yet another iteration of the female body fabricated by the cultural desires and social standards of contemporary times. Hua recreates the idealistic female body circulated and consumed in the digital space: unnaturally pink hair falling over flawlessly airbrushed skin, exaggerated curves causing the body to walk awkwardly. Hua points out how contemporary images of women are ceaselessly altered and post-produced. The Venus in the digital era is the computer game avatars with disproportionately accentuated body parts and beauty-filtered selfies flooding social media.
Photo Courtesy: Shaoyu Ba (Unheard Body, Xilichen Hua, 2025, Exhibition View of ‘Stick On the Collage’, 1215 Gallery, Montreal, Canada.)
Yet Hua refuses to reduce the complex positions entangled with the female body to a simple diagram of the gaze. Instead, Hua constructs a space of ‘glitch.’ This space allows “claiming our right to complexity, to range, within and beyond the proverbial margins,” as articulated by Legacy Russell. Hua’s Venus inhabits the glitch, embodying its tensions. She embraces the contradictions of her body, claiming, “my body, once constrained, is now both a subject and witness, both object and agent.”
Xilichen Hua’s work is currently on view at 1215 Gallery, Montreal Quebec, Canada.
About the Artist:
Xilichen Hua is a digital and mixed-media artist whose practice focuses on the subtle tensions between the body, gender, and the gaze. Beginning from personal experience, she explores how social norms and cultural gazes inscribe silent traces upon the body and shape the formation of subjectivity and identity.
About the Art Critic:
Kahyun Lee is an independent curator and researcher whose work frames curating as both a critical practice and a mode of alternative knowledge production, extending beyond the boundaries of visual arts. Driven by an interest in conditions and formations of dominant narratives, Lee’s curatorial practice questions the structural frameworks such as institutions, national borders and identities. Through the language of exhibitions and programmes, Lee aims to cultivate a collective space that reflects on the past, examines the present and reimagines the future.
Currently, Lee is a doctoral researcher at the Royal College of Art London and Tate Modern supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership. Lee’s research explores transnational curating and curatorial narratives of East Asian contemporary art at Tate Modern. Lee also delivers public programmes at the Design Museum London, making design accessible to all and fostering collective insights into the world through the lens of design. Lee previously curated exhibitions and programmes at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan and the British Library.
