Singapore, February 2003: Juliana Yasin's spacious high-rise apartment has an all-white interior and a stunning view of Singapore's skyline. But what catches my attention is a lone portrait of a nude woman sitting with her legs spread wide in a casually defiant, sexually charged pose. I'm no prude when it comes to art, but the drawing isn't what I'd expected to find in the home of a practicing Muslim woman. Yet Yasin professes to be as engaged with her religion as she is with her career as a performance artist. Her life melds the two; why wouldn't her home?
She prays occasionally, eats halal food, and fasts during Ramadan (or tries to). She wore a head scarf in her youth and has gone on prehajj pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina. Yet, while retaining her identity as a Muslim, she has also been deeply involved in discovering her identity as a woman. Her work reflects that duality. In the past, she has pasted clippings from Playboy magazine onto a fellow performer's nude body. In Yasin's most controversial work, The Veil, she cloaked herself entirely in black and hid her wide-set cheekbones and full lips behind Islamic masks that she had found in Dubai. These masks traditionally served to confirm a woman's chastity and mark her as her husband's property. That Yasin, who stopped wearing her scarf during her university years in Australia, was saying something else was made clear by the sign she held: THE SUBJUGATION OF WOMEN IS A WORN-OUT HABIT IN SAUDI ARABIA.
The Veil played in Singapore, Thailand and Germany, but it was her hometown Muslim community that was most scandalized by its content. The island state's only Malay newspaper criticized her for casting Islam in a bad light, and the Islamic Religious Council complained to the theater group staging the performance—but took no further action. In a letter to the paper's editor, Yasin tried to explain that her goal has been to question the rigid definitions of being a Muslim woman in the modern age. "It's not about religion," she says, "It's about culture. I think it's cruel to make women wear this mask. I'm a Muslim, but the Koran doesn't say you have to veil. That's a man-made law." Islam advocates modesty, and Koranic interpretations state that men are superior to women. It doesn't take long with Yasin to see that these are not tenets to which she ascribes. "I do believe in God," she says, "but there are some laws I can't get a handle on, like on divorce and segregation. I find these things fundamentally unfair." When pushed to explain how she balances the demands of her faith and her craft, Yasin is hard pressed to come up with an answer. In the end she says simply, "I'm an artist. I am a woman, a human being, getting to know myself and my body. What's wrong with that?" She laughs heartily, then adds, "But sometimes I wonder, 's--- what am I doing?'"
In her foyer, she has a photograph of herself with her boyfriend of three years, an Englishman with whom she now lives. Remembering my own Catholic mother's admonitions not to marry outside the church, I asked Yasin how her family receives her mixed-race, cross-faith (he's a Protestant) relationship. "If I'm going to get married, I'm going to have problems [with my dad]," Yasin admits. But she says her father—who supports her career—tolerates the coupling for now (Yasin's late mother, who was Chinese, converted to Islam for her Malay husband's sake). "I want my boyfriend to convert, but he doesn't want to and I don't want to force him," she sighs. After all, had she accepted the labels others tried to put on her, Yasin never would have discovered herself as an artist, a woman and a Muslim. Combining those powerful but oft-diffuse aspects of her persona might just be her most accomplished work.