If you’re in Amsterdam, you can’t miss Huis Marseille’s group show Shadow Self: The Portrait to a Parallel World, which puts together the work of five Asian artists tackling subjects like our digital footprint, generative AI creation, religion, identity, fashion, or the fandom phenomenon. On view through February 9, this exhibit makes visitors question their beliefs, digital selves, and the things from our inner psyche that we try to hide from ourselves as well as others.
But first of all, what is the concept of the shadow self? It was conceived by psychologist Carl Jung, and it refers to the unconscious aspects of your personality that you may repress, reject, or hide. These can include emotions, fears, desires, or traits that conflict with your conscious self-image or societal expectations. It’s like the dark side of the Moon — only it’s of our psyche. But it’s not inherently bad, rather neglected or misunderstood.
With this concept in mind, we find the works of five artists working across photography, video, and multimedia installations. For example, Singaporean artist Charmaine Poh (1990) was a child star actor in a TV show titled We Are R.E.M. That experience marked her forever, and she shows that in the video Good Morning Young Body (2023), where the eternally twelve-year-old character E-Ching (which she played years ago, and that now she recreates using deepfake technology) responds to the public comments and scrutiny she was exposed to at the time. With this work, Poh addresses issues surrounding virtual ownership and digital footprint.
Another video-based work is that of Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen (1990), who presents two pieces: Tyrant Star (2019) and The Trouble with Being Born (2024). Through them, she speaks of wounds and ruptures in the image that she creates for the camera using disconcerting materials — the act of recording involves a certain degree of violence. Another sort of violence surrounded Korean artist Heesoo Kwon (1990) when she grew up in a strict household marked by two pillars: the patriarchal Korean culture and Catholicism. Thus, she created Leymusoom, defined as “an autobiographical feminist religion.” Using snakes as a starting point because of their shedding of the skin, which she thinks of metaphorically as leaving your past life behind, Kwon created a fluid entity between snake and woman that now appears in her childhood family photographs.
On another hand, Shuang Li (1990) also reflects on her childhood memories and uses them in works like the video piece My Way Home Is through You (2023). In it, the Chinese artist links memories of her youth in a small industrial town in the Wuyi Mountains to the cover of a family photo album and stock images she found randomly on the internet — one of them being a Swiss castle, which she later discovered was a juvenile prison. Homesickness, nostalgia, and confinement are tackled through her compositions. In another piece of the exhibit, Déja Vu, Shuang Li also reflects on space, time, and distances in today’s world.
To finish, the beautifully delicate images of fashion photographer Xiaopeng Yuan (1987) create new and unexpected stories through the manipulation of bodies and objects in space and in unlikely combinations. The Chinese artist’s rich visual world makes us question what commercial photography can be about, and how it’s evolving with the ever-growing new technologies.
