Explaining ornamentalism via Equinox adfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

Asian women aren't your decorations. You've probably seen this Equinox ad all over the internet with creators calling it out for its sexualization and dehumanization of Asian women. And while it's really disgusting, it's unfortunately also nothing new. The logic behind this ad is the same logic that drives underground artists to use Asian girls as their covers, that imagines Asian women as sex dolls, and that fuels sexual violence against Asian women. And that is the logic of ornamentalism. The term comes from scholar Anne Ann Lin Cheng, who developed ornamentalism as a theory of the unique gendered and racial positioning occupied by the yellow woman. The yellow woman isn't just reduced to an object in the familiar sense. Instead, she occupies what Cheng calls the para humanity of Asiatic femininity, a peculiar state of being produced out of the fusion of thingliness and personness. The yellow woman is simultaneously person and thing, human and ornament, with her ontology inseparable from aesthetics and artifice. She exists as a contradiction, as both corporeal and abstract, a full and empty signifier. She circles better is excluded from humanity. She represents feminine values better is not considered a woman at all. The dehumanization of ornamentalism comes from the fact that she isn't simply made into an object, but that her personhood itself is imagined through objects. Her presumed interiority is externalized onto her clothing, architecture, surroundings, and other cultural signifiers. Chang writes that she is not just framed, but also deeply infused by the built environment. She accessorizes the furnishings while the furnishings accessorize her. The yellow woman is an object person. She is the teapow and the porcelain and the doll, but these objects are also her. She's at once valued for her aesthetic qualities, while those qualities are simultaneously imagined as the whole of her identity. This produces an aesthetic abstraction of personhood. If the yellow one's interiority is in its whole externalized, then what remains of her as a subject beyond her aesthetic representation? If tier personhood can be distilled into the objects through which she's represented, then the distinction between person and thing begins to collapse. This is what Chang describes as the interchangeability of persons and things. The ornament doesn't merely represent the Asian woman. It becomes part of the ontology through which she's imagined. We can see this in the portrayal of Asiatic femininity throughout the history of Better art and culture. Films like Ex Machina and Blade Runner present technologically constructed feminine bodies whose desirability is inseparable from their artificiality. The yellow woman's para humanity allows her to simultaneously be admired, exoticized, and consumed while also denying her humanity. She is the better China Doll sex robot album cover. She is desirable yes distinctly inhuman. In fact, her peri humanity, and thus subsequent lack of autonomy, becomes part of her appeal. Though her aestheticization may appear to be superficially flattering, it's also inseparable from her subordination, as the varied qualities through which she's admired prevent her from being seen as a fully autonomous being. Indeed, the yellow woman occupies a unique position of subjugation, as she bears the privileges as well as the penalties for being an aesthetic being. And so the Igonox bad is just another example of all of this. The yellow woman is constructed to be desired without possessing an independent will that might interrupt the desires projected onto it. She is the ornament, there for you to look at with no will of her own.