The title of the exhibition takes its name from a series of murders that took place in Hong Kong in the 1980s. The perpetrator murdered four women and called himself the “The Female Butcher on A Rainy Night.” The case sent shockwaves through the Pearl River Delta at the time, while popular culture continued to reproduce it through a considerable number of films, television productions, and media narratives, even giving rise to copycat crimes. Yet popular interpretations of the case almost invariably pathologize the perpetrator, attributing the crimes either to some form of misfortune in his family background or childhood, while simultaneously treating violence as an exception. But if violence is attributed to abnormality, evil, or misfortune, can its effects truly be expelled from the everyday, allowing “us,” those shaken by it, to remain unscathed and preserve the integrity of our souls? Is this, in a cultural sense, a form of exemption from violence? As third parties—each of us who hears of it, watches it, or merely brushes against it—what responsibility do we bear for the circulation of violence? Is the disavowal of supremacism itself not contradicted by the unbearable fact that its object has already entered into a relation with “me,” and continues to haunt and disturb “me”? This was perhaps the question that initially set artist Mei Ruowen in motion—or, perhaps more precisely, the question that came to trouble her. What we encounter in her work is the accumulation of a difficult and sustained struggle with these questions.

“Rainy night” evokes a contradictory scene: cold and severe, washing away traces and concealing evidence; yet it is also associated with a sentimental affect, as though a rainy night were an image that invariably resides within the poetry of remembrance. The same condition thus splits into two forms of ethical appropriation. This doubleness is also embedded in Mei Ruowen’s practice. She is consistently activated by things originating in structural discrimination, yet she often appears hesitant and painstakingly cautious in deciding how to approach her objects. Her works begin with sharply delineated outlines made with a hard pen, which are then repeatedly altered, covered, blurred, and redrawn. Her painted figures frequently draw upon the visual language of shōjo manga—large eyes and exaggerated expressions functioning as a direct, nonverbal interface with interiority. At the same time, however, she withdraws from pure affect, searching for narrative references with the diligence of someone writing a thesis. Her images are often crowded with an overwhelming density of quotations and allusions. She then leaves a “window” within the scene, suggesting that both she and the viewer remain outside the reality of the other. She wants to strike directly at the target, yet repeatedly interrogates every decision. She longs for a female prophet to reveal an epiphany, while continually reminding herself that the prophet’s revelation is precisely a prophecy whose content cannot be known in advance. Her exhaustion occasionally turns into a form of self-mockery. Some works in the exhibition imitate the effect of the luminol reactions commonly employed in forensic investigation: only under ultraviolet light do fluorescent traces and markings, concealed in daylight, become visible on the surface. Yet at times she herself can no longer remember exactly what she has hidden. The exhibition as a whole resembles a detective meditation, repeatedly entangling itself with clues and traces, reassembling and laying out a possible route toward an understanding of relational reality, though one obstructed at every turn. Figures and narratives traverse one another across different paintings; one event seeps into another, forming, to some extent, a transversal sociality. Throughout our long and occasionally interrupted conversations, I have repeatedly found myself thinking of the work of Lauren Berlant.

Berlant argues that what occupies the position of “truth” for the modern subject is not sexuality, as Foucault proposed, but emotion. Emotion does not offer the subject self-confirmation so much as an epistemological disturbance. We therefore need to reconsider attachment and incoherent affect as infrastructure, including both the unexpected discomfort produced by the good life we desire and the unbearable violence embedded in everyday ordinariness. The optimism promised by the sovereign fantasy of the liberal subject tends to internalize social disturbance as privatechoice, while rendering structural problems exceptional. Nonsovereignty, by contrast, is a form of realism, an a priori condition of life. The experience of nonsovereign relations is an inconvenience. In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Berlant argues that the inconvenience drive keeps us in states of discontinuous and asymmetrical attachment to our objects. “Being in life without wanting the world,” as a political affect, is both a symptom that emerges after encounters with trauma, transgression, frustration, disgust, or some form of brokenness, and an infrastructure through which one ceases to seek integration into normativity. Practice under such conditions does not mean romanticizing dissociation as a once-and-for-all exit, nor does it yearn for a return to or restoration of the regulatory “world.” Rather, it means continuously loosening its hold through friction, moving toward the otherwise.

Another thread of the exhibition originates in the death of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, who fell from a building in New York. Her husband, Carl Andre, was charged with her murder but was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. After Mendieta’s fall, Andre called the police and stated that he and his wife were both artists, that they had argued because he had greater public visibility than she did, and that she had subsequently fallen from the apartment window for reasons he could not explain. Embedded within Andre’s statement is a disavowal of intimacy: by invoking the greater fame of one party, it encloses a coherent and autonomous self, separating him from the ambiguity and anxiety of intimacy. Yet both experience and history have demonstrated this to be an anti-realist desire. Andre could never fully escape the influence of his deceased wife. His major exhibitions have repeatedly provoked protests and renewed discussions surrounding Mendieta’s death, including the question of whether the moral stain of a life can be excluded from consideration when evaluating the artistic achievements of a successful male artist. Yet the event has not merely haunted Andre’s professional career. It has equally continued to haunt the remembrance of Mendieta herself: whether the public exposure surrounding the unresolved case has overshadowed the questions generated by the work of an artist who was herself a woman of color. These debates, in turn, reveal the predicament of the modern subject organized around autonomy, freedom, and reason, as well as the paradox of separating production from reproduction. Artistic production is represented as the achievement of an autonomous individual, while the intimacy that sustains, penetrates, and shapes that production is required to be stripped away from the equation. Such separation, moreover, simultaneously assumes the structures of gender, race, and class. As Eva Illouz argues, love is not peripheral to modernity but a microcosm of modern society. This is manifested in the contradiction between autonomy and recognition/attachment within romantic relationships. The recognition of the other in an intimate relationship can bring ecstasy, sustaining and valorising the subject, while simultaneously planting within it the latent pathology of loss and non-sovereignty. The free subject finds itself through transformation and transgression, yet the autonomous subject also confronts the possibility of losing itself precisely through transformation and transgression. Autonomy thus remains in a perpetual state of defence, and therefore becomes non-autonomous. Let us recall the paradox of subjectivity so often found among creative partners: when one party possesses greater social visibility, society tends to attribute intellectual sovereignty within the relationship to that party. The other is then confronted with

the shame of having to continually prove the purity, independence, and completeness of their own subjectivity, in order to avoid being regarded as an appendage. As though the two had never penetrated one another, disrupted one another, or completed one another through that very mutual destruction. Intimacy, in its capacity to make one “love each other to death,” increasingly comes to resemble the game of murder itself.

Within this detective meditation, the artist contemplates the possibility of making “屠/夫” undergo a grammatical split. In The Dream of Ana Mendieta, within that high-rise assembled from the abduction of subjectivation, ghost authorship, and fantasies of normal and abnormal relations, the murderer falls. The “husband” who is killed—regicide—is less a gendered figure than a position within a relationship: a position that guards the illusion of sovereignty and attempts to walk away unscathed.

Text by Duruo Wang