Looking for women with brains didn’t work last year.
So this year, the organiser of miss Singapore World is employing a controversial new strategy – only pan-Asian looking women need apply.
A spokesman for Limelite Productions, which is organising the pageant, told the New Paper: “In the past, we sent girls who were really tall, really fair, had really dark hair, and who answered questions well. But the formula hasn’t worked.
“So we are experimenting with different strategies, and this year, we have decided to send a representative who looks pan-Asian.
“Our definition of pan-Asian is women who have both Asian and Caucasian features.
“To achieve this, apart from picking girls with pan-Asian features, we will have their hair lightened, their skin tanned, and they will also wear contact lenses to lighten their eye colour for the rest of the competition.”
Last year, the pageant organisers dumped their usual height and weight requirements and focused on finding intelligent women instead.
Potential contestants were posed tough questions like being asked for their views on infanticide in India and plastic surgery.
But it didn’t work – Singapore’s miss World representative, polytechnic student May Hsu, did not place in the international finals in London last November.
So this year, the organisers changed tack.
Apart from getting women to sign up for the pageant, the organisers also took to the streets in search of pan-Asian looking beauties.
Said the pageant spokesman: “Give us a chance. We are really passionate about finding a girl who can win the international finals for us.”
And they aren’t worried about criticism that Singapore maybe pandering to a specific notion of beauty.
“Since we are a multi-racial country, a pan-Asian looking girl would, ironically, be a representation of many of the races we have here,” the spokesman added.
The contestants the New Paper spoke to said they weren’t too concerned about the focus on pan-Asian looks.
Said Management Development Institute of Singapore student Jaime Lim, 18, who is Chinese: “There are pros and cons to having a pan-Asian face…but it all boils down to personality.”
Joe Biden Plastic Surgery, Joe Biden hair transplant, Joe Biden bald spot—When Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama revealed his running mate for the upcoming election, he also revealed SenatorJoe Biden’s ancient hair transplants. Make me Heal explores Joe’s hair loss history and how it can be improved in the future.65-year old Joe Biden has been fighting hair loss for many years. in the 1980’s, the Senator elected to undergo hair transplants, which was then a relatively new procedure. At the time, the white-haired senior citizen still had dark hair, making his transplant stand out more than ever. now, his new position as the next possible vice-president is drawing renewed attention to the experienced politician’s hairline.Hair loss expert, Dr. Alan Bauman tells Make me Heal, “I’m not surprised Joe Biden’s ‘infamous’ incomplete hair transplant is getting attention once again, like it did a few decades ago. Many actors, politicians and those in the public eye have undergone medical treatments and sought other methods of restoring their hair—some successfully and others quite obviously not.While the hair transplant methods employed by today’s board-certified hair restoration physicians include training in safe and aesthetic surgery, those who had surgery years ago often were not so lucky. Undetectable restorations using old-style methods are difficult if not impossible, except under the most ideal circumstances. and, while refinements and touch-ups are possible, his results underscore the need for careful long-term planning from the get-go. Thankfully, in the field of microsurgical hair restoration, “we’ve come a long way, baby!” and modern transplants can potentially yield 100% natural, undetectable results.”Hair restoration has changed considerably in the past decade or so, improving so much that the results are nearly undetectable.Dr. Bauman reminds Make me Heal, “Senator Biden’s situation is also an excellent example of the wide misconceptions regarding modern hair transplantation.His transplants, initially performed decades ago, are a “relic” of the dark ages of hair transplant surgery during which time widely spaced, large ‘hair plugs’ (skin grafts) of 20-30 hairs each were used.For perspective, keep in mind that many men who received the first old-style transplantswere listening to 8-track tapes and carrying briefcase-sizedcell phones at the time. Imagine if George Washington’s wooden dentures were used just a few years ago and how that might contrast with today’s undetectable dental restorations! The point is that we’ve come a long way in the field of the medical treatment of hair loss in just a short period of time, so the past does tend to haunt us a bit.”Dr. Bauman tells Make me Heal the differences between the old and newer, superior techniques of hair restoration, “The permanent nature of hair transplantation (which uses hair follicles that are immune to male pattern hair loss) provides a dramatic ‘look’ back into the sometimes ugly past of hair transplantation. in other words, the ‘pluggy’ transplants of years ago are still growing!these old ‘hair plugs’ are in stark contrast to today’s methods of undetectable single-follicle and “follicular-unit” methods of implantation used in modern hair transplant procedures. in addition, today’s highly trained surgeons are well-educated in the artistic planning of hair transplantation—a very critical step—and use microsurgical techniques to transplant literally thousands of follicles transplanted individually, or just two or three at a time.The advances in microsurgical techniques also include the planning of the aesthetic parts of the procedure—for example, creating a big ‘wall’ of hair at the hairline, leaving a huge bald spot behind is typically not considered an aesthetic approach.
Other get-ups are less elaborate, but no less striking. one recent portrait shows the 27-year-old artist squeezed into a schoolgirl outfit from Ann Summers – ill-fitting mini-kilt, white knee-high socks, blonde pigtails – sulkily holding a sign that reads ‘I’M IN MY PRIME’. for her full-length portrait of a ‘female artist’, meanwhile, she popped on a nude bodysuit and accessorised with heels, plastic breasts and giant pubic wig.
Today, Maple has come as a young British artist – in red woolly jumper, paint-spattered jeans and Doc Martens. The eyeliner is extravagant, the dark hair a bird’s nest of Brandian proportions but otherwise this is clearly a dress-down day. "would you like a cup of tea?" she asks politely, heaving open the door to her studio, a lock-up on an unlovely industrial estate in Crawley. Inside, the room is tidy, a little girly, perhaps. There are flowery deckchairs and pencil pots dotted about, a sofa covered in a bright pink throw and on the far wall an immense canvas showing the artist standing, fist raised, in the middle of a group of horrified bystanders. The front of her white skirt is stained with blood.
"It’s called Menstruate with Pride," says Maple, busying herself with the kettle. The other day, a builder from one of the neighbouring lock-ups dropped by and spotted the painting. "he said, ‘What are they all looking at, then?’. I hadn’t painted the bloodstain on yet, so I told him. he said, ‘Okaaaay’." she laughs. "I love getting the reaction. when people see my work, I want them to feel something. If it doesn’t do that then I don’t see it as serving a purpose. and people always react, whether they love it or hate it."
Barely five years out of art school, Maple has already experienced her share of both reactions. in 2007, she won the inaugural new Sensations Prize – a high-profile search by the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4 for the UK’s most promising art graduate. a year later, the windows on her first solo exhibition, at Salon Gallery in London, had been smashed and she was receiving death threats. The provocation was a series of paintings which showed her, a Muslim, wearing her mother’s burka and, variously, smoking a cigarette, wearing a badge saying ‘I Heart Orgasms’, baring one breast and cradling a piglet.
The work was a response to her upbringing in Eastbourne – "the whitest place in the world" – the youngest daughter of an Iranian mother and a Kentish father. "There were no Muslim people apart from us. I remember thinking, ‘I wish I knew just one Muslim person, that someone would get me and what I’m talking about’", she says. "I just didn’t feel like I should be judged for being mixed." Judged she was. even her parents refused to speak to her for two days after the exhibition opened. "it was horrible. even now I feel paranoid," she says. "If I could take it away, I probably would [but] I don’t regret the work I made."
For a couple of years she was "paralysed", unable to make art. Then she found feminism. What started out as the odd performance piece – standing in the window of House of Fraser holding a sign saying ‘Women! Flash for a discount!’ or slipping her own, clumsily covered-up version of page 3 into hundreds of Sun newspapers across London – has become her artistic raison d’etre.
The result is It’s a Girl!, her first solo exhibition in the UK since the piglet controversy. While less incendiary than her 2008 debut, it is no less punchy – a riotous, ridiculous, angry, absurd take on modern womanhood, from Vogue to vajazzling, misogyny to menstruation. It’s Tracey Emin crossed with the Guerrilla Girls, with a hefty nod to Cindy Sherman’s cartoony self-portraits and the sign pictures of Gillian Wearing.
The Disney Princesses are typical of her tongue-in-cheek swipes at gender politics – slapstick, sharp and immediate. Beneath the wigs, though, lies a serious message about girls who are brought up to aspire to fairytale ideals of passive beauty.
"saying you’re a feminist seems to be the worst thing in the world," says Maple. "I’d love to bring it more into the mainstream. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about." Elsewhere in the show the artist poses in pink bunny ears holding up the sign ‘Recovering Misogynist’ and photographs a vajazzle which up close spells out ‘Votes for Women’. it was inspired by the now notorious Newsnight segment devoted to the trend. "What really annoys me is the way feminists disagree with one another. We’re all on the same page! some women were saying, ‘This is so trivial. Vajazzling is not an important issue’. Well, yes it is. all these little things feed into our culture – and make it worse."
After misogyny, Maple’s other favourite target is the art world. in a not-so-subtle dig at a certain millionaire artist, she recently had a T-shirt made up with a picture of a shark and photographed herself wearing it, holding a sign which reads, ‘I’m an Edgy Contemporary Artist’. "I’d been talking with my artist friends about how fed up we are with this obsession with the YBAs. come on! There’s a new generation out there! Let’s talk about someone other than Damien Hirst."
Or Tracey Emin. Inevitably, Maple’s in-yer-face, self-centred take on the female experience has seen her hailed as the heir to the most infamous of the female YBAs. "It’s a bit lazy as comparisons go," she pulls a face. "It’s like she’s the only woman artist people can think of." Stella Vine, Frida Kahlo, Peter Blake and Hogarth are her favourite artists, but the influence of the YBAs is undeniable. and not just because, in Saatchi, she shares the same Svengali. she made the work which first caught the collector’s eye when she was in her final year studying Fine Art at Kingston University – a photograph of herself wearing a pair of ‘I Love England’ pants, standing in front of a poster of Kate Moss. So began half a decade of dress-up.
She also shares the Saatchi brood’s witty, conceptual approach, and talent for self-promotion. she had a faithful following on MySpace before she had a degree. last week, a giant portrait of her proudly displaying her hairy armpit was plastered across London Underground and she is currently being trailed by two documentary-makers from LA who are making a film about her. "it will be like a reality show – The Only Way is Maple!" these days her paintings sell for £5,000 to £20,000, while her single-edition photographs go for up to £10,000.
She is now on the hunt for the next piece. "I don’t feel like I can make work without an idea," she admits. "But I don’t think you can just have craft either because that’s boring." The death of her grandmother last year has inspired a more reflective approach, perhaps a return to work about her faith. she points to a large self-portrait, in which she stands against a white wall, wearing jeans and a simple green T-shirt. "It’s called Self-Portrait with Cat and Grandparents. It’s the first time I’ve ever painted something while crying. I’ve never felt emotional making something before," she says, looking thoughtfully at the canvas. "That’s the only one I really put my heart into. I am quite private, really, even though I show my face all the time. I don’t really want people to know what I’m feeling."
It’s a Girl! is at the Aubin Gallery, London E2 (aubingallery.com), from 9 February to 9 March
The New Paper Wednesday, May 09, 2012
