| Haizan Shaw’s Red Flower Girl is composed of large, stiff, ellipses of crimson gather round each other, colonizing into bunches, pointing in, at other times proudly growing outwards. Caught in these different stages, these ranging moments of the flowers give the piece a still movement. These crowding clusters of petals orchestrate the photo’s atmosphere, providing the viewer with the sense of a floating and wavering delicacy. Perhaps mimicking the movement and feeling of the surrounding plant life, the nude that takes center stage amongst them translates some of the same notions. Lying, ever so elegantly and modestly over herself, with the same grace of a Renaissance nude, her form sings the similarly smooth melody into the photo’s composition. |  |
Claire Feely
Haizan Shaw’s Red Flower Girl is composed of large, stiff, ellipses of crimson gather round each other, colonizing into bunches, pointing in, at other times proudly growing outwards. Caught in these different stages, these ranging moments of the flowers give the piece a still movement. These crowding clusters of petals orchestrate the photo’s atmosphere, providing the viewer with the sense of a floating and wavering delicacy. Perhaps mimicking the movement and feeling of the surrounding plant life, the nude that takes center stage amongst them translates some of the same notions. Lying, ever so elegantly and modestly over herself, with the same grace of a Renaissance nude, her form sings the similarly smooth melody into the photo’s composition. She shies away from the viewer’s gaze, looking in toward herself, preserving her anonymity. There is a sort of conceptualized female elegance that ties into and seems to accentuate the visual beauty and harmony that can be found in this photo’s smooth textures, brilliant colors, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, and harmonious composition.
Diverging slightly from the mood found in Shaw’s Red Flower Girl, Black Forest renders a different perception. Sitting atop a more prominently stark black background are two rows of red birds of paradise, most of which have not opened or bloomed, they stand pointing straight up with their appendages of leaves straying not far, at a close angle. The two lines of flowers are separated by a female nude bridged in between, belly up. Her hips and upper thighs receive the most light while the rest of her fades into the background, though just enough light is spared to make the figure’s nipple visible, just barely peeking around the edge of a leaf; its presence is subtly made known. Still it does not nearly serve as provoking as the larger and more highlighted display of the figure’s genitalia. Standing with the same sharp, erected presence as the birds of paradise, the figure’s pubic hair points out straight to form a fan of hair. There is a sharpness pronounced in this piece, a tone of confrontation, of tantalizing threat. The flowers’ piercing presence along with the provocative pose of the female nude make for a depiction many would consider “naked” in comparison to the classic “nude.” Shaw’s photographs depict the dichotomy of the female nude in art. Blushing, tender, graceful is a traditional, modest nude against a sprawled, spread, open and unabashed naked woman of what we’ve come to associate contemporary portraits with. The result of the juxtaposition of the two seems to create a stressed, disquieting transition from one to the other, playing with the audience’s personal regards of femininity.
