See What You Do?
Artist
Fay Ku
(b. 1974)
Date2008
MediumGraphite and watercolor on paper
Dimensions50 x 74 in.
ClassificationsDrawing
Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund
Object number2009.33
DescriptionFay Ku is a visual storyteller who reexamines familiar narratives from different cultures in light of contemporary experiences. In See What You Do, she presents a woman clad in peacock feathers blindly slashing through the "eyes" of trees in a dreamlike forest. The delicately drawn yet disturbing image references a Greek myth that captivated her since childhood. When Argus was slain by Hermes, the goddess Hera immortalized the eyes of her dead watchman in peacock feathers. Ku recalls that while peacock feathers have "eyes," they are "blind, belonging to a dead monster."At the time she created See What You Do, Ku was concerned about the state of U.S. foreign policy, believing "the government was behaving without self-awareness, without wanting to take a hard look at our own destructive actions." From a personal perspective, she was reflecting on her "relation to the rest of the world as a woman, the simultaneous desire to want to be seen, to be looked at, and yet not wanting to be objectified. . ."
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, and educated at Bennington College and Pratt Institute, Ku came to the U.S. at the age of three. Her body of work evolves out of her sensitivity to how we treat and interact with one another based on her own experiences of growing up in two cultures. At once a call to action and a deep self-reflection, See What You Do prompts us to rethink how we see (or perhaps don't see) the consequences of our actions.
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