When most Brown students head to the P.O. to pick up care packages or their weekly subscription to the Economist, Lauren Khoo '08 discretely slips her copy of Playboy magazine into her handbag.
"Pornography really only became a serious source of inspiration for my art in the past year," Khoo said. "It's not as though I can ask my friends to pose for me like these girls do."
In her upcoming show "Beleza Roubada," Khoo's longstanding fascination with female sexuality comes to the fore. With their bubblegum pink backgrounds, swirling arabesque lines and touches of glitter, her paintings present a distinctly feminine take on sexuality. Tinged with an exotic and Oriental flare, Khoo's work somewhat resembles Japanese pop art, combining calligraphic contours with various decorative floral patterns and foliage motifs.
It is tasteful soft porn with an Asian twist.
Considering her upbringing in conservative Singapore, a country where pornography is still banned and Cosmopolitan magazine only recently hit newsstands, Khoo's provocative approach to sex may seem surprising.
"In Asian families, sex is still very much regarded as a taboo. My intention in the paintings therefore is to shock people back home," Khoo said.
As startling as Khoo's works may be, they are not as perverse as what one might find in explicit centerfolds of spread-eagled barely legal playmates.
Though their poses may initially appear transcribed from porn magazines, Khoo's figures in fishnets, dangling from acrobatic sex swings and engaging in erotic foreplay, are enfranchised with a certain authoritative power. Promiscuous yet nonetheless in full control of their sexuality, these are women who enjoy sex and are unashamed of making it known.
A woman wielding a whip is not portrayed as the kinky object of a man's dominatrix fetish, but rather as an autonomous and totemic figure of sexual empowerment. These women are glorified and monumental, owning and commanding the spaces they inhabit.
Khoo channels the expressive potential of the nude female form rather than objectifying it for the male gaze. "I have always felt that a woman's body is the ultimate representation of beauty and strength," Khoo said.
On one canvas, silhouetted bodies engage in some kind of rapturous interaction almost as strippers lathering one in another in baby oil. The lustrously smooth surface of their skin and the seedy nightclub lights give the impression that human flesh has been transformed into bronze. There is an almost statuesque quality to this self-contained figure grouping. A theatrical concoction of male fantasy therefore becomes a timeless celebration of the sexual act where women call all the shots.
"Beleza Roubada" opens Monday on the second floor of List Art Center.
