Farewell to Mr. Arnold

The concept of makeup as a means of survival is captured in the male soldier’s camouflage technique and expressed as a video installation work. Just as men wear makeup (camouflage) as a means of survival to hide their appearance from enemies in war, women wear makeup as a means to survive by highlighting themselves in a patriarchal society. To express this concept, the author cites a camouflage scene in a war movie in which male soldiers perform in the dark. Both male and female makeup and camouflage are related to the survival of society. The work employs a strategy of recontextualization by quoting and transforming the conventional Hollywood movie images (Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1987), and transposing them into a colorful make-up scene. As the title of the work shows, the image of a man’s face disintegrates over time and evaporates solid masculinity and dichotomous gender differences into iridescent light.