Angela Pan
LITA 利它
‘LITA 利它’ is a project that explores the relationship between characterisations of the feminine body, transcendence, and the conceptualisation of ‘emptiness’ within Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and capitalism.
LITA is an avatar birthed from fantasies, promises of liberation, and questions of desirability and individuality.
Borrowing from databases of similar myths, such as Japanese battle girl icons and the bodhisattva of compassion Guanyin, LITA is a pun and hyperbole from ‘altruism’ in Chinese to exemplify virtues of sacrifice, selflessness and emptiness.
The idea of consumption and repetition formulates a lingering desire on a data level, which dismembers the body to quench a void of lack.
However, rather than universalising experiences of liberation and emptiness, would there be an emptiness that holds cultural relativity and is a productive force? Perhaps their truth is that there is none.
Having an abundance of what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call ‘organs’ or organisations, the organs we are attached to or those socio-cultural experiences and histories that cling onto us could be seen as illusions of the singular self. In search for a detached ‘non-self’, these illusions can be appropriated and experimented with to generate new myths of becoming.
