Harmonious Anatomies: Dissecting Liu Xiaoxian's Marriage of Medical Opposites

Following his relocation in 1990 from Beijing to Sydney, Australia, contemporary artist Liu Xiaoxian developed an abiding fascination with the multiple, frequently fractured forms of identity that can arise from encounters of 'East' and 'West'. Evidence of this fascination can be found throughout his substantial body of photographic and sculptural work, in which essentialist and even stereotypical cultural types are deliberately juxtaposed to suggest an apprehension both of intimate similarities and untranslatable differences. In "The Couple" (2004), however, one of several works created during Liu’s first return trip to China in that year, this tension between harmony and dissonance arises with particularly acute affective resonance. The work appears at first to be a relatively overt visual pun, pairing a cast-bronze replica of a Ming-dynasty (1368-1644) figure marked with the acupunctural meridians and a medical anatomy model imitative of those created in Europe in the same centuries. The partial dissection of the latter, however, encourages viewers to look beyond this deceptively simple opposition. Laid open by a more surgical analysis, "The Couple" can be read as an image of divergent yet corresponding bodily typologies, associated by the artist with different cultures and genders. Through acupuncture and anatomy, as practices that imply, on one hand, a holistic understanding of vital circulations and, on the other, an analytic isolation of organs and tissues, Liu highlights the simultaneously composite and singular nature of the body as a dynamic assemblage of co-dependent parts. In opposition to the normative logic of dominant medical models of bodily experience, as well as the comparably normative logic of the cultural archetypes these models elide and endorse, this chapter will use "The Couple" to disrupt the assumptions of such frameworks and propose a more globally and materially mobile vision of embodied identity.