Kan Xuan

Kan Xuan is a visual artist, experimenting with paintings, photographies and video installations about modern China.

Kan Xuan´s photographs of peeled toads exemplify this principle of inadvertently converting the fearful or inconceivable into the acceptable by constituting it art.

She began her series of toad photographs as a way to exorcise her fear of the amphibian. The series commences with images of Kan Xuan posed with the toad positioned on increasingly private or sensitive parts of her nude body. Having overcome her fear of the animal through this exercise, Kan Xuan then photographed the toad sitting in a clear plastic purse.

Finally, she had the toad skinned live at the market (a common practice for smaller frogs), positioned it again within the plastic purse, and photographed it. The final photographs are eerily beautiful, the frog pale and delicately pinkish, the purse clear but slightly tinted, the background a blank white.

Perhaps for her this represents a final conquering of the toad, causing it to suffer and then die for her art. She admits to the cruelty, saying that we all have the potential for this within us, at one time or another. Author: Karin Bergquist

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