Saving Face...the movie!

IMDB link

This tongue-in-chick movie explores Chinese-American face-losing and face-saving, not in the immediate social interactions that Goffman describes, but nonetheless transgressions of social grains in the Chinese-American community. The movie centers around Wil, a young female surgeon (add to the mianzi) who is secretly a lesbian (big time losing face). Her mother who lived a role of traditional good wife (lots of mianzi) but got pregnant with an illegitimate lover Wil's age (definitely losing face).

In the movie, both Wil and her mother dealt with various strategies to minimize face-losing within the community as they fell from their well-respected positions, while trying to not lose face in front of each other.

In the optimistic end, they both decided and helped each other to pursue their love without worrying about the face, a move that actually lead to the community's acceptance and they reestablished their faces. At the end of the movie shows the newborn baby, the lesbian couple, and prominent figures of the Chinese-American community in New York all gathering joyfully at a party. Wil's girlfriend's father made a remark that sums up the face-saving: "well, at least she's with a surgeon."

Other than wildly entertaining, I found this movie portraying a more nuanced and long-term sequence of face-losing and face-saving of how a community maintains its (perhaps we can call) social equilibrium. Every small talk or brief conversation is loaded with potentials to lose face or to save face and with considerations of the facework in the bigger picture. For example, in the trailer where Wil's father asked "you are not also pregnant, are you?" was simultaneously a derision towards Wil's mother and a way out for Wil, as the implication is "well, at least you are not pregnant out of wedlock."

This movie also explores other aspects of inter-cultural facework that are subtly contested. For example, when Wil's mother asked Wil with a derisively surprised tone "Since when do you drink beer?" highlights the tension between generations and between one who grew up in New York and one who was a transplant. The act of drinking beer might be gaining face for Wil but losing face for Wil's mother, complicating her facework.

Judith Sapine : Face Recognition

Turning corners in the city is amazing because there is seriously graffiti every where. One artist I  noticed several years back was Judith Supine. I thought their work was related to this week's reading because of face recognition. I feel like when I look at their work, I have an internal conversation of "where is that from? who is that? i feel like i know that person!". I think it is because these faces are complex mixes of different elements of different faces. Similar to Chuck Close, i feel like the end product is always a portrait with different approaches for each time.

Darius Milhaud's "4 faces"

Smith's article reminded me of French composer Darius Milhaud's viola piece "the four faces." Milhaud was quite a bit earlier than Barthe and Sartre, so it might be stretch to impose the humanism ideas on him. This piece was supposedly written for a friend, each movement captures/portrays the face of a different woman from California, Paris, Wisconsin, and Brussel.

I am not sure where the eyes and the nose are in each movement, though I imagined Milhaud is perhaps portraying in a way that lines up with the Schopenhauerian concept of music representing the will and not the form, etc, etc. But I wonder if it is precisely because faces are thought of as representing some sort of underlying truth or character that allowed a composer to musically portray a face?

Some thoughts on Condo and how his work relates

When we were at the museum last week, I thought "Introvert" and the sequence containing Uncle Sam, the Screaming Priest, and "Client No.9" were particularly striking.

At that time, I thought "Introvert" was captivating mainly because I couldn't tell for sure what was going on. It's not quite abstract enough to just think "oh this is abstract art" but it was not definitive what was in the painting. And I couldn't stop thinking about the room that contained Uncle Sam, Client no.9, and the Screaming priest, because each painting had such cartoon-like characters in brightly colored fantasy lands that it seems like a screen shot from a Saturday morning cartoon show, but the subjects of the painting were disturbing enough to be R-rated. The blurb on the wall said that Condo is known for creating simultaneous multi-layers of contradicting emotions, and indeed paradoxes abound in many of the paintings we saw, but I thought for some reason the contrasts between happy bubbles (literally) and sinister scenarios in the Uncle Sam series was particularly jarring.

After we left the museum, as I looked up more of Condo's works and rethinking the ones in the museum, it occurred to me that the paintings that were particularly intriguing to me are the ones where the paintings sits on a mid-point between social critique through parody and irreverent dark humor. Paintings in the Melancholy series such as Jesus, the Secretary, and the Sitting Women were so effective in capturing the melancholy that I thought the paradoxically comical caricature faces was over-powered and thus did not create enough tension.

My two thoughts are that

1. I did not realize when I was at the museum, but the faces in each painting plays a really important role in maintaining this paradox that I found so compelling. For example, in Uncle Sam and Client No.9, my first response was that I was intrigued by the juxtaposition between the smiley-face bubbles and the bright colors with what the characters are doing. But later I realized that what the characters are doing is a little odd, but my immediate perception of sinister came large from their facial expressions. If these paintings had characters with smiley faces, the irony would be of a different sort. Similarly, I thought the melancholy paintings portrayed a particularly lugubrious atmosphere, but afterwards I realized that there wasn't really very much about what the characters were doing that was melancholic. Instead, their faces were all kind of bland, to the point where the cartoony caricature of their faces only seem like a mockery at their blandness/melancholy.

I thought a lot of what we've read in this class has to do with how we read faces and what faces is supposed to represent and what messages a face is supposed to send by making an expression, and it was interesting how much I couldn't help myself but to do exactly the reading into the faces that all these authors have been debating about. It also surprised me how easy it was to see past the exaggerated facial features, and the degree to which I responded to these faces without ever consciously thinking that I am going to read the facial expressions.

2. The other thought was that these faces are kind of becoming the face of Condo's artworks as they thread together the exhibition. I found that quite interesting-- as he obliterates a face he creates a face in another sense.

Kanye West and George Condo

So, on the latest Kanye West album, George Condo did the art work for it.
Apparently, the first cover was banned in several stores and they didn't use it in the final run, yet it was included with the album art work. This was the first cover:

source
This is the cover he ended up using, also created by George Condo:

source

Graffiti artist: Fafi

I have been trying to post graffiti artists that paint faces every week, and this graffiti artist Fafi, does paint faces but she also paints bodies as well, a lot. The photos here focus more on the face. I think most of the graffiti artists faces really correspond well to Condo's work that we saw in the New Museum. Most of these faces are portraits of imaginary people - and often they have interesting characteristics. What I think connects more with Condo, in Fafi's work, is that she usually, if not all of the time, paints these characters with acrylic paint and a paint brush - which is something that will separate her from other graffiti writers. She also deals with this specific archetypes at times!  Enjoy.

in Toulouse, France. Source

in Barcelona, Spain Source

Face as landscape