FANTASIES OF ‘HOME-MAKING’ IN THE WORKS OF YIN XIUZHEN, MONA HATOUM AND NIKKI S. LEE

This thesis conducts interrelated monographic studies on a selection of artworks made by three women artists, Yin Xiuzhen, Mona Hatoum and Nikki S. Lee in the 1990s and 2000s, which provide productive ways of imagining subjects’ encounters with foreign places and other bodies in an increasingly interconnected, yet unevenly developed globalized world. By employing quotidian household materials, objects and banal labour, these artists, in their practices, investigate notions of home and belonging in a constant state of transregional, transnational movement and exchange. On the basis of their itineraries throughout multiple local dwelling environments, they construct their artworks as affective objects or spaces of mediation to engage themselves and viewers in various inter-bodily, intersubjective and intercultural communications and contradictions. By drawing on the works of feminist scholars, such as Luce Irigaray, Sara Ahmed, Iris Marion Young and Alison Weir, this thesis develops a theoretical framework underpinned by post-structural, post-colonial feminist theories and psychoanalytic discourses, exploring a number of contradictory terms related to ‘home-making’, including placement and displacement, construction and preservation, habitation and uprootedness, and domesticity and publicity.