Aimee Meng

My practice stems from a fascination with kawaii culture, psychoanalysis and craft. These interests act as a backdrop for my investigation into the ambivalent nature of issues traversing infantilisation, fetish, domesticity etc., and their impact on the individual and collective mind. Drawing influences from manga and anime, I employ narrative devices as a means to materialize the elusiveness and volatility of our emotions and psyche. Fabricated personas play the role of surrogates, embodying those who are often wandering along the periphery of a phallocentric social fabric.

These simulacra oscillate between the sweet and the perverse, the infantile and the
adult, in a world where reality and fantasy, the imaginary and the symbolic all become increasingly superimposed. 

I also incorporate hobby craft and household materials into my work which usually require repetitive labour. This facilitates my effort to subvert the notion that the home is a ‘safe haven’, and at the same time allows me to re-examine and problematize domestic stereotypes, namely the house wife and the otaku. I seek to portray the real lived experiences of domestic life, where comfort and conflict, intimacy and transgression are messily intertwined.

I am an advocate for ‘saccharine feminism’ and ‘excremental philosophy’. Through visual excesses of cuteness and abjection, I scrutinize definitions of femininity and modernity’s obsession with sanitation, while striving to destabilize and obscure the binaries and taboos which structure the fibre of our very beings in current society.