The Man in the Back Seat

Elena Šmakova (3-4/2009)

 

In the accompanying text, Liina Siib refers to travel notes from China 1974 by Roland Barthes, where Barthes describes China at the time as a sexual desert. Contemporary China does have more room for desires, but nudity, and especially the nudity of men is still relatively ‘innocent’, and so there is potential for the emergence of new meanings. The representation of the male bodies displayed by Siib is like a reality, which finds itself in a predicament; men practicing martial arts are loaded with meanings that differ from those usually attributed to corporeality.

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