The description of the body in this chapter exposes the innate, each person’s differences. From gender, race, age and all stages of life. The artists in this chapter use drawings and installations to interpret the properties and images of the body. The images in this chapter play with cultural codes by entangling them with elements of the opposite cultural code. These images raise key issues of consumerism, sustainability, gender, sexuality, race, aging, feminism, war, and more. The theme of the body has led many to the path of the artist. The aesthetics and also the various creations are changing over time with the times.
In this chapter I reflect on the short film Human Masks, a 19-minute short film by French artist Pierre Jürget in 2014, which also chose this theme. He used a very artistic approach, not focusing on the people themselves, but picking a monkey. But the mask is a mockery of the monkey’s innate characteristics: it is the embodiment of the most seductive and cruel anthropomorphism, creating a literal barrier between the monkey’s world and ours. Many of the shots also suggest that it actually belongs to nature, but that it has evolved in some ways to be like humans, but not human in our usual sense. It often looks at its hands and finds itself on them, realizing that it still has a furry body, before proceeding to wander through the entire house. At the end of the shot, Yuge gives the camera to the monkey’s eyes. Although with the mask is not moving, but you can see through the mask underneath the eyes. Sometimes focused, sometimes confused. Yu Zhe places his work in an absolute environment, a bit like the doomsday movies made by Hollywood directors, but the Fukushima nuclear power plant is an absolutely real environment. He takes the questions of science and morality that are often discussed in such apocalyptic environments and puts them into the body of a monkey, expressing the superiority of humans over nature and the morality of animals satisfying human needs. Humans are the only species that often deceives, and the only species we can deceive is ourselves. You can put a monkey in a mask, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t make it believe the lie. All it knows is that it is a monkey.