I am Fine: What Woman Wants: Portraits, Figures and Fictions of Femininity

An old mirror, its frame patinated like a piece of brocante, bears a phrase engraved in fine strokes: I AM FINE. Niels 'Shoe' Meulman's script, heir to the calligraphic gesture of illuminated manuscripts as much as to that of graffiti, curls into the glass. It only truly appears when one looks into it: the reflection of the face and the words overlap, and it is the visitor themselves, or more often herself, who becomes, in spite of themselves, the support of the work. This gesture gives the exhibition its title and its guiding thread. I AM FINE, the phrase one tells oneself, the phrase one tells others, the front one keeps up. The exhibition brings together works from the collection which, each in its own way, come to crack, question or, on the contrary, inhabit this phrase, the one worn like a mask when one is a woman being looked at.

The exhibition opens on faces. That of YZ's Empresses, doubled and crowned with traditional ornaments, an artist who has spent a decade building a personal mythology of the sovereign woman, half icon, half warrior. That of the young woman filmed by Erwin Olaf in an interior suspended between the 1960s and today, or caught in the gilded frame of a doorway at the Du Mansion in Shanghai. Two regimes of representation answer one another: the woman staged by the male gaze of studio photography, and the woman who reclaims her own image.

It is precisely this second gesture that the women artists in the exhibition embody. Cecile Cornet paints a marked body, scars, dark braids inherited from an intimate, familial gesture: painting becomes an ex-voto, a memory of the body passed down from mother to daughter. Prune Nourry, with her Terracotta Daughters heads, invents an imaginary army of girls where history left no trace, literally turning the void left by the one-child policy into a sculpted presence. Faith XLVII, whose obsessive script covers entire pages of found paper, shapes a spiritual iconography that escapes any gendered assignment, the better to assert a voice. Xi Song, assembling hundreds of second-hand books into balls of papier-mâché, shapes a landscape of abandoned knowledge, a quiet homage to a form of learning too often made invisible.

Around these gestures of self-representation, other works question the way the female figure is manufactured, shaped, sometimes erased by the outside gaze. Vhils's veiled, scraped-away face emerges from torn advertising posters, as if the woman could only appear through the destruction of her own commercial image. Zevs attacks this same image head-on, literally shooting at the giant face of an advertising model, an act of vandalism turned manifesto against the visual tyranny of fashion. Rakajoo paints a young woman seated alone in a green-toned waiting room, surrounded by empty chairs and an African mask lying on the floor: physical presence and questions of identity answering each other in silence.

Other, more oblique works widen the scope. The mermaid summoned by Jacques Villeglé, the Black Panther woman drawn by Shepard Fairey in homage to the militants of the Black Panther Party, the reclining figures of Mark Jenkins left on the ground: so many ways of making a woman's body appear, or disappear, within public space.

What these works, carried by women and men artists alike, weave together is not a fixed identity of femininity, but a permanent tension between the image imposed and the image reclaimed. Facing all these figures, Niels Shoe Meulman's mirror closes and reopens the exhibition: it shows nothing but whoever leans into it, and whispers back a phrase that may be a denial, a wish, or a simple truth. I am fine. It is left to each of us to decide what it conceals. The exhibition does not claim to settle this question. It offers to look it in the face.