Hyper Girl

HYPER GIRL
Tzeng Yi-Hsin

When a woman of flesh and blood is distorted and reduced purely to a sex symbol, is it possible to liberate her with a new artistic meaning? The artist Yi-Hsin Tzeng's solo exhibition in 2015, HYPER GIRL, seeks to achieve just that.

Yi-Hsin Tzeng completed her master's degree in Art and Design at Savannah College in 2011. In recent years her work has focused on deconstructing "Beauty" and 'Authority'. Through a series of modified portraits, she redefines their meaning and introduces a surreal aesthetic – often using popular commercial images. In 2009, while attending an art residency program in New York City, Yi-Hsin Tzeng began defacing the portraits of celebrities and politicians – thereby reinterpreting their meanings as cultural symbols. Gradually, the artist began defacing the entire body as well; the new meaning and imagery created by this act has been explored.

In Yi-Hsin Tzeng's first solo exhibition in 2015 she began exploring the sexualization of women's bodies. In the United States in the 70s and 80s, there were many erotic images of women in popular culture. Capturing these women in seductive or provocative poses in in photography caged them as sexual objects – Yi-Hsin hope to liberate them through paintings.

The girls in these erotic photos presented stereotypes, a kind of hyper sexuality, with disproportionate bodies. These absurd behaviors inspired Yi-Hsin to create the "Hyper Girl" series, by scanning, enlarging the old erotic photos and painting on them with her unique artistic language

"Hyper Girl" can be seen as a Super Hero, a rare and extraordinary representation of the human figure. Through the spiritual conversation with the girls in the pictures, the artist offered them with whole new appearances by her arts. This series challenges our understanding of sexuality, by assigning a form which transcends reality and creates a hyper-reality, a surreal visual style that turns absurdity into adorability and shame into significance.