Soe Yu Nwe

(she/her)
b 1989 Lashio, Myanmar/Burma
Lives and works in Yangon, Myanmar/Burma

Soe Yu Nwe’s Feminine Wound takes the form of a glittering porcelain snake—the artist’s Chinese zodiac animal. Originally created as part of a series of serpents, the autobiographical work references the artist’s feelings of isolation and difference growing up as a female of the Shan Chinese ethnicity in Myanmar. Offering up this zoomorphic symbol of self, Soe’s work finds a material means to express and explore psychological and social trauma, and a sense of feminine interiority in the luminescent but bloodied and dissected body of the snake. Visually alluring with its colourful red-green glaze, but gruesome in sight, the length of the snake is partially exposed to reveal the bone white of its skeletal structure and the blood red of internal organs. Evocative of a sense of beauty, delicacy, as well as physical injury, Soe’s snake constitutes an intimate reflection of cultural alienation, and a feminine identity and experience that is inseparable from bodily trauma and pain.

Feminine Wound 2015
porcelain, glaze and oxides, lustre
167 x 182 x 20 cm