bambi birth

Right now in the north corner of the first floor of the McMaster Museum of Art, laying on the tile, is a gray set of plausibly female legs. Torsoless, the groin is bound in gauze, a big paramedic’s spool of it floats up into the sky. Like a transsexual’s phallus (indeed, the work is titled "A She"), a crooked, bony animal leg pushes out from between the legs, kicking the air. The phallus/animal baby is almost pornographic in size, and resembles the beginnings of a breeched baby fawn.

The first critique I read of Insoon Ha’s work explains that she is concerned with the abuse of “comfort women” in Korea (she is originally Korean, now apparently living in Kitchener). The next critique claims very vaguely that she is disturbed by what can happen in the “name” of progress.

Why the fawn leg, Ha? Bambi as USA? It is a good image, lots there: the deformed womb all planted with a big crooked c*ck, the birth of “deformed” genetic mixes of Korean comfort women and occupying soldiers (one body for captor and slave/animal and master), the pretty tissue cover-up that simply got tugged away.