Art in Text with Sena Cleave
Art in Text with Sena Cleave
Sena is an artist whose work draws upon literary texts from the early 1900s centered around Japanese history and culture. Drawing from her heritage and framing these texts through modern, cross-cultural perspectives to highlight the roles women were forced to hold up in the past. Her works point out the ridiculous ideologies that were placed on women by society. Citing that although feminist movements have been able to rewrite these views bit by bit, enough so that the texts that we will be discussing in this interview will sound absurd to the modern reader, her works serve as a reminder that many women globally are still objectified and held to increasingly impossible standards. Sena utilizes concepts of translation and mistranslation, pointing out the gaps between language, space and text.
Debbie C: Your work is heavily influenced by ideas surrounding feminism, it’s also a big part of the conversations we like to have as well. Let’s talk a bit on how this practice for feminism came about.
Sena C: The first thing that comes to mind is the feminism in my work is fueled by anger. In terms of what people will say about women, about girls. Having a lot of female friends, makes it inevitable that I would end up talking about girls and our experiences a lot. So it's fueled by a personal vendetta against the patriarchy.
Debbie C: This anger comes through in subtle ways. A recent project of yours takes text from a Japanese story entitled, Futon by Tayama Katai. Which is the title of the work and the also the book that your work is based on. It consists of a video with an audio recording where you read out an excerpt from the book while dual screens showed footage of your hands flipping through the book, the screens were a representation of how you wanted to portray the two sides, left and right, western and eastern cultures which the book discusses in its comparisons between European and Asian women from the perspective of a man.
Sena C: I was looking at my mum's old photo albums from her childhood in the 70s and 80s. Often it would be my grandma and her friends and their children in the photos. There was this typically feminine, domestic space, you could see that there was a particular sense of fashion in the photos. I decided I was going to make a work based on those photos and based on some images from a Shiseido magazine I found. I saw some similarities and image tropes in the composure of women and girls in my family photos and in magazine covers from the late 1800s all the way up to the 1930s and 40s. My jump from Shiseido to the Tayama Katai book came from an interest in publication and writing and printed images and printed text as a medium of disseminating ideas. I came across some novels from Japan reading them and read about the novels. It seemed like there was this real literary scene active in the early 1900s. In the late 1800s, in the Meiji era, it was understood as a time where Japan was modernizing itself by copying the West. So, I was reading these books and not only were the authors using an anglicized sentence structure but they were also directly quoting and misquoting from Russian, German and Dutch plays and books. Western texts were what was in Vogue at the time.
Sena C: I selected these passages from the book and read them out loud. Continuing my thoughts about Tayama Katai and his book, Futon. I chose passages where the author had read in the western books he was reading, describing a certain type of feminine ideal. And he translated that version of femininity into his own book and projected it unto his women characters. There was this funny thing happening where Tayama Katai writes about a version of himself in his protagonist, a character approximates to himself in Japanese society; a middle-aged author who was not very successful at the time. A student comes into this character's life, a young girl. She writes to him, and right from the beginning, it is established that she is a good writer but from the protagonist's perspective in the novel, the author projects a lot of what he is reading. And just like the author, he too reads a lot of English literature, and projects a lot of what he reads from the western novels onto Yoshiko, the young girl, teaching her how to be the right kind of woman.
Imagined Invitation to A Ball in Edo, 2020
Debbie C: Your works also bring up topics of translation and mistranslation, the gaps between people and language. This is shown in Futon as well as in an earlier work you did to make a zine called, Imagined Invitation to a Ball in Edo, 2020. It’s based off another text about Japan this time by a French novelist named Pier Loti. Both texts, Futon and A Ball in Edo parallel each other when discussing women’s roles in Japanese society in comparing them to western women ideals.
Sena C: I made a zine based on a text by a French Naval officer, Pier Loti called A Ball in Edo. I think it is interesting to think of Tayama Katai and Pier Loti's writing in the same framework as they were both written in the same timeline and were heavily centered on Japanese culture at the time and Japanese women. They were aware of the changing times in Japan but accounted their experiences of Japan very differently. Through A Ball in Edo, Pier Loti writes his account of his visit in japan, conveying his opinions as fact. He writes about a real ball that took place in a real building. He calls it a ball in Edo but by that point, Tokyo, the city had been renamed for about 42 years. The building was called the Rokumeikan, it was a building that was constructed by the Japanese Government who hired a British Architect, (Josiah Condor), specifically to impress western dignitaries visiting Tokyo.
Debbie C: Both texts are incredibly objectifying of women as well which allowed you to tap into your rage against the patriarchy. These two authors contrast each other seeing as they come from different cultures, but really hold hands when it comes to the way they view and write about women.
Sena C: My rage is going strong. They really do hold hands when it comes to women. It is funny because we were talking about how similar these texts are in their treatment of women, and Pier Loti thinks that the Japanese are completely incapable of doing what the westerners do because evidently, and it's not like misogyny didn't exist in Japan prior to contact with the west, but this specific type of misogyny was different. The idea of romantic love was a modern thing for Japan. Before that, arranged marriages were a more customary practice. My grandparents were an arranged marriage. Before the modern idea of love as we understand it today, the male relation to a woman could either be as a concubine for sex or as a wife or the domestic. And in neither of those two spaces were women expected to have opinions but with modernity, there came this idea that women should be educated, and it wasn't so much that they were suddenly feminists when it came to modernity. But it was because with globalization, it was encouraged for society to increase its literacy rates in keeping up with modernism. It became important for women to become educated and to be able to read and write well.
Debbie C: What I appreciated about these works were that they spoke for themselves. Because the times have changed so much from when these texts were written that the ideals regarding women in at least western modern society are completely out of date, ignorant and inappropriate.
Sena C: In discussion about modernity, about the idea of women being educated and being able to work though the expectation to have a family is still there on top of now the additional expectation of having a successful career. And women who choose to devote themselves to either are still criticized and judged by their relatives and peers. In it I think there are some good things, like the fact that everyone I've ever shown Pier Loti's A Ball in Edo to has thought that it was atrocious.
Debbie C: How do you see your work or future works in relation to current ideas of modernity?
Sena C: Part of it is a familiarity, I read about the way these fictional women characters are created by these men and then demonized by the same men who created them to be the way they are. I really related to that. The idea of someone having this narrative about me and then demonizing me for the narrative that they created for me. This is still something that happens and so I think in that sense the work is current. There is an aspect of this work that's about copying and translation. These two works were written in a time when Japan was actively copying the west and so there comes the idea of authorship. In the sense of who invents things, who invents ideas, where do they come from and how do they get disseminated and is even possible to trace back where an idea originated from. I think it's an incredibly difficult thing to do and white men get a lot of credit for originating ideas. My work is driven by a desire to rewrite the connotations surrounding these actions that are often considered secondary but not authorial actions.
Sena C: I made a zine based on a text by a French Naval officer, Pier Loti called A Ball in Edo. I think it is interesting to think of Tayama Katai and Pier Loti's writing in the same framework as they were both written in the same timeline and were heavily centered on Japanese culture at the time and Japanese women. They were aware of the changing times in Japan but accounted their experiences of Japan very differently. Through A Ball in Edo, Pier Loti writes his account of his visit in japan, conveying his opinions as fact. He writes about a real ball that took place in a real building. He calls it a ball in Edo but by that point, Tokyo, the city had been renamed for about 42 years. The building was called the Rokumeikan, it was a building that was constructed by the Japanese Government who hired a British Architect, (Josiah Condor), specifically to impress western dignitaries visiting Tokyo.
Debbie C: Both texts are incredibly objectifying of women as well which allowed you to tap into your rage against the patriarchy. These two authors contrast each other seeing as they come from different cultures, but really hold hands when it comes to the way they view and write about women.
Sena C: My rage is going strong. They really do hold hands when it comes to women. It is funny because we were talking about how similar these texts are in their treatment of women, and Pier Loti thinks that the Japanese are completely incapable of doing what the westerners do because evidently, and it's not like misogyny didn't exist in Japan prior to contact with the west, but this specific type of misogyny was different. The idea of romantic love was a modern thing for Japan. Before that, arranged marriages were a more customary practice. My grandparents were an arranged marriage. Before the modern idea of love as we understand it today, the male relation to a woman could either be as a concubine for sex or as a wife or the domestic. And in neither of those two spaces were women expected to have opinions but with modernity, there came this idea that women should be educated, and it wasn't so much that they were suddenly feminists when it came to modernity. But it was because with globalization, it was encouraged for society to increase its literacy rates in keeping up with modernism. It became important for women to become educated and to be able to read and write well.
Debbie C: What I appreciated about these works were that they spoke for themselves. Because the times have changed so much from when these texts were written that the ideals regarding women in at least western modern society are completely out of date, ignorant and inappropriate.
Sena C: In discussion about modernity, about the idea of women being educated and being able to work though the expectation to have a family is still there on top of now the additional expectation of having a successful career. And women who choose to devote themselves to either are still criticized and judged by their relatives and peers. In it I think there are some good things, like the fact that everyone I've ever shown Pier Loti's A Ball in Edo to has thought that it was atrocious.
Debbie C: How do you see your work or future works in relation to current ideas of modernity?
Sena C: Part of it is a familiarity, I read about the way these fictional women characters are created by these men and then demonized by the same men who created them to be the way they are. I really related to that. The idea of someone having this narrative about me and then demonizing me for the narrative that they created for me. This is still something that happens and so I think in that sense the work is current. There is an aspect of this work that's about copying and translation. These two works were written in a time when Japan was actively copying the west and so there comes the idea of authorship. In the sense of who invents things, who invents ideas, where do they come from and how do they get disseminated and is even possible to trace back where an idea originated from. I think it's an incredibly difficult thing to do and white men get a lot of credit for originating ideas. My work is driven by a desire to rewrite the connotations surrounding these actions that are often considered secondary but not authorial actions.
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