Abstract
The “chora” (maternal space) is full of ambiguity, chaos, the unspoken, feminine jouissance, and ecstasy. Plato used it to explain the indescribable mysterious feminine principle that was “like a womb.” Julia Kristeva feels that this is a body space shared by a mother and her children, and considers it to be a threat to the masculine symbolic world, which promotes rationality, stability, coherence, and logic. Kristeva borrows the chora concept to explore the driving relationship between the speaking subject and the symbolic system. I use this driving force to record and describe the unexpected space I share with my daughter, Yuan-Hao Ting. After finding out in February 2002 that another living being had entered my body, I gained a sense of mission concerning this mysterious space. I have tried to learn about the interacting energy between the emerging life and its mother’s body in my explorations of the “ehora,” and record the mental and perceptual process in my art. I often pondered the world with my belly while pregnant, and wondered what kind of space it was. Was it the secluded realm that Dante constructed in his “Divine Comedy”? Was it a virtual cyberspace to which people flee when they become exhausted? What kind of pixy could enter there? Were not these questions the same as when, four hundred years ago, Michelangelo asked of a big piece of stone,“What life is waiting within for me to liberate it?” I asked these questions right up to the moment that the world within my belly began to make obvious movements. Sometimes it felt like gentle wiggling, sometimes like stubborn confrontation, and sometimes like teasing provocation. I tried to be tolerant as I listened, felt, and teased. I felt that I could sense a chaotic “divine music” responding to me. Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan might have felt that this divine music was a yet unspoken linguistics symbol and form of meaning, and its phallus-transcending characteristics belonged to the feminine jouissance of the body. It was an unsaid state that had not yet entered a symbolic system, and was composed or led by the intersection of all kinds of impulses and desires. But to Kristeva, the sound is indeed a “yet unknown region of creative impulse.” Her meaning is the womb, the mother’s nurturing life, and space containing energy, in which only sound or rhythm can manifest this state of existence. From the point of view of Luce Irigaray, this feminine context can be examined using a “speculum,” and after using it the deconstruction strategy of eliminating principle, God, transcendence, the phallus, and symbolic order highlights the subconscious level of the feminine “Other” and its fluid cognitive values. After transcending masculine thinking, the feminine deficient (absent) space will receive unprecedented respect and acceptance. To H?1?ne Cixous, this IS an “?criture f?minine” written in “white ink”; it cannot be interrupted, it is endless, and it doesn’t need grammar. Its freely flowing text makes people feel blissfully intoxicated. The physical experience of this period, like a kind of feminine jouissance, led me to approach an issue that I had tried to explore in the past, but certainly had not truly realized: the possibility of transcending existent symbolic systems and texts. During the inexorable course of pregnancy, I often sat in still contemplation and probed the living environment, space, medium, sleekness, and action within me. I assembled these behaviors and thoughts intelligible to the real world into the alien sensation of being pasitized. For its pt, the parasitic entity kept up an intimate connection and mutually bound relationship with the subject. This ambiguous, chaotic experience was communicated solely through the “divine music,” which was the only way that it could approach a state of “clarity” in visual language. In the repetitive process of communication, many images and goals variously came out into the cognition to which they were originally attached, subverted the self, and again gave voice from this subversion. This often prompted me to linger in an “incomplete” free state. My daughter Yuan-Hao Ting afterwards left the “chora” where she had dwelt for nine months. When I recall the tune that I composed during that period of time through thought, research, physical experience, and painting, I feel a profound sense of the uniqueness and value of women’s characteristics. They can experience a distinctive creative space unique to women in this journey of the“chora”.