Creation: 2012
Materials: Root of ancient camphor tree
Dimensions: 240cm x 190cm
Photography: Cao Qian

About “ The Flowers of Evil”

In all the world

Old camphor wood

A flower and none

Is Yin not yang

Is and is not

Charles Baudelaire’s

The Flowers of Evil

Xiao Lu
14 January 2012, Osmanthus-Rain Villa, Hangzhou, China.

In male-dominated discourse, a woman’s vagina is the shubjest of insult. In his famous The Tropic of Cancer, the American novelist Henry Millar compared the vagina to “an ugly notch, a never healing wound and a despicable ditch. “The artist borrows from the French poet Baudelaire’s famous poem collection The Flowers of Evil and associates the vagina with a huge free stump shaped like the organ, to reveal the insults and injuries women have suffered throughout history.

—— Tong Yujie