Artist: Xiao Lu
Creation: 2012
Materials: Root of ancient camphor tree
Dimensions: 240cm x 190cm
Photography: Cao Qian
About “ The Flowers of Evil”
In all the world
Old camphor wood
A flower and none
Is Yin not yang
Is and is not
Charles Baudelaire’s
The Flowers of Evil
Xiao Lu
14 January 2012, Osmanthus-Rain Villa, Hangzhou, China.
In male-dominated discourse, a woman’s vagina is the shubjest of insult. In his famous The Tropic of Cancer, the American novelist Henry Millar compared the vagina to “an ugly notch, a never healing wound and a despicable ditch. “The artist borrows from the French poet Baudelaire’s famous poem collection The Flowers of Evil and associates the vagina with a huge free stump shaped like the organ, to reveal the insults and injuries women have suffered throughout history.
—— Tong Yujie
