Face masks, apart from saving your life, can also double as a bikini. Provided by a Japanese blogger on the website www.sarsart.org is a black-and-white photograph of a woman wearing nothing but four standard-issue face masks: one over each breast, one over her private area, and, of course, one over her nose and mouth.
In quite a different context sits "N96" by artist Chuang Pu. Fifteen photograph portraits are hung in the corner of the Song of Life: 100 Artists exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum: each person wearing a face mask over nose and mouth, each frame connected by a wire to a thermometer that is stuck perpendicular to the wall. Several polka dots mark the portraits' glass surfaces in various solid colors, an accumulation that indicates these subjects have passed temperature tests in several buildings. The stickers are usually given as a voucher for normal temperature.
Upon closer examination, the face masks in the photographs have an unusual assortment of color, and this is because they are all made of bras.
What's the cover-up? Perverse humor aside, during the SARS epidemic showing your nose and mouth was as taboo as - how shall I put it? - not covering yourself. There's something slightly disturbing about this, given that it means most of your biological facial recognition instinct has been rendered completely futile. And you thought all Asian people looked the same before.
It was frightening," says Taiwan stage actress and television personality Swallow Chang, of her performing experience during the epidemic. "It was a sea of masks." In the late-May premiere of the play On a Distant Planet, A Grain of Sand, directed and written by Stanley Lai, Chang and others in the cast performed not to appreciative faces, but to mute masks of judgment.
And this image, of floating masks and vanished faces, has made its way into contemporary art. The "SARS Art" website, created by Californian technology journalist Xeni Jardin as a branch of a weblog, speaks often and loudly to the international community, and part of its permanent visual vocabulary is the mask. Masks on cows, masks super-imposed on pre-existing pictures of models, masks on traditional Door Gods, and more. For the fashion-sensitive paranoiac, designer facemasks, and for the online instant messenger junkie, cheerfully masked emoticons. There are even post-Mao kitsch posters arranged in cartoon format, now citing SARS as the enemy. The comic strip features the industrious peasant shouting things like: "Comrades! Bad News! SARS is here!"; "What's to fear? I've got a gun!"
It seems that there are two main responses to masks: 1. Wow, it's Halloween forever (i.e. the image of Darth Vader wearing an N96) and 2. They-are-everywhere-its-crazy-we're-all-gonna-die. In the first case, we can put masks on anything. It's funny, let's all look stupid together - everyone and everything gets a new identity to hide behind. In the second, you get more perverse responses that have an undercurrent of desperation, and often take the form of black humor. Yes, we're all stuck indoors and the world as we know it is ending. Yes, we're surrounded by non-people, and we are doomed to join their ranks. Let's laugh at the defiance of a cartoon with prostitutes dressed in face masks that proclaim: "Fuck SARS." Let's laugh at the stupid man who's got his entire head in a mask and is stumbling blindly down the street. Urban "hip" images come from this response, with the cool t-shirt icon "Outbreak Girl" selling rebellion against the contagion. Yeah, we're defiant. We look cool in masks. We have personality.
But maybe there's a third response: some are working off the desperation to seek a "healing of wounds." From the Song of Life exhibit (June 29-August 31 2003), whose mandate was just that, a new piece issues a manifesto. A spare canvas, covered in harsh brushstrokes, turns out to be masked faces, apparitions in a crowd; not petals on a wet black bough but scratchy sketches done in black Chinese ink of various shades. Painter Chih-Mao Lee's "Exorcising SARS" is for the most part faceless, although it is not without an inscription in red running down the right side: "In May of the year two thousand and three, SARS drifted in and polluted Taipei's sunny skies. All of us together contribute energy to clean and eradicate this invisible evil spirit."3 While the style embraces the stark anonymity of a SARS era, the painter's self-proclaimed motto is one of collective spirit. Reconciling the two sentiments is almost the raison d'être for the work, and the exhibit in general, considering that Lee was one of the several big name artists in Taiwan who helped pull the exhibit together in a matter of two or three weeks.
The project was one of three organized by the United News media company, which puts out one of Taiwan's major newspapers as well as a steady stream of literary publications. In an effort to get people out of their homes and put an end to the fear, organizers produced a reading group, a musical concert, and this exhibit of 100 artists. Collaborative efforts across the board attempted to bring the people back out into the streets, into public places - giving the average middle-class person an illusion of being cultured before he or she steps out for a Saturday afternoon at the department store.
And the people came in droves. By July, it seemed as if the Taiwanese public had forgotten about the existence of SARS. People rubbed shoulders in shopping centers and walked unmasked onto public transportation. They spent family weekends out and about, including excursions to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and shoved for seats at public talks by famous artists that had been orchestrated by the curators. Whether UDN succeeded or not at their cultural project, they certainly brought the public back to previously deserted urban spaces.
Was that it? Was that the end of SARS paranoia, and the specter of effacement? In the new V-10 Reunion exhibit at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, a large installation covers an entire wall. It consists of countless little circles, each a tiny portrait of a human face, arranged in chains and collectively drawing the lines of a large human face with closed eyes, a Buddha-like figure of repose. All the portraits that are below the nose are masked with the same uniform surgical masks. The title? "Reflecting Upon the Self." On an adjacent wall, the artist claims that he is aiming for a "big reflection with little photographs." Typical of those working from SARS inspired themes, he is using anonymous faces of society to form a larger picture, and a larger significance. What enlightenment are we supposed to achieve by looking upon these faces, what reflection, what self?
You're masked. What do you have to hide? Is it actually the disease, or is it your own fear, which shouts out anyway, plainer than your nose? When you're one among many masks, who are you? Are you playing doctor, robber, follower, Darth Vader?
Masks mean there's a possibility you're going to die. And there it is - the possibility reflected back at you in millions of masked faces. There is real fear hiding behind the scratchiness of your throat, in the corners of the house that you no longer leave, bursting to get out. Will you ever walk unafraid down a city street? Will you take off your mask and laugh?
1 N96 is a standard surgical mask with a particulate filtration (PFE) of 96%, which means only 4% of particulates can enter. N means that the mask is not oil resistant; it is not yet the highest level of protection available with modern technology.
2 Quoting Ezra Pound's "In a Station at the Metro": "An apparition in the crowd/ petals on a wet, black bough."