Men Carrying Shame

To date, the men who have become hopelessly addicted to pornography seem to still receive surprisingly little understanding from the public. They tried in vain to rid the sense of shame. A brave new world is within an arm’s length outside the window, yet they cannot help but sit idly in front of the screen. Their physical experiences are completely unhooked from the real world. They subjugate themselves to their obsession with obscene images. No one really cares about their inner world. The Taiwanese men who grow up in the company of Japanese porn serve as a stellar example of such sense of shame. The work Men Carrying Shame addresses exactly this unresolved issue. It contains a box with a hole that allows each viewer to hide his/her upper body and watch the video “in private,” while his/her lower body is exposed. The video repeatedly displays a similar hole in which heterogeneous elements and spaces are collaged illogically.

遲至今日，那些A片成癮而不可自拔的男性們似乎仍未得到應有的體諒與理解。那個戒不掉的羞恥感，那世界就在一尺之遙卻枯坐在螢幕前的焦慮，與現實脫離的身體經驗，自我在影像前的全然放棄等等問題，沒人真正關心。而在日產A片籠罩下成長的台灣男性，更是這種羞恥感的絕佳案例。《羞恥の男性》討論這樣的問題，它以一個開了洞的盒子，讓觀者下半身暴露在外，上半身卻得以「私密地」觀賞盒中的錄像。錄像裡也不斷地出現著一個相似的洞，將幾種相異的因素與空間非邏輯地嫁接並帶領觀眾穿越其中。