The new work by Bianca Censori sparks debate by turning female obedience into a sophisticated aesthetic, questioning power, domesticity and symbolic control.
Bianca Censori’s debut in the contemporary art world arrives with an intensity that is impossible to ignore. Her project ‘BIO POP’, unveiled in Seoul as the first instalment of a cycle set to run until 2032, promises to challenge domesticity and the invisible mechanisms of social control. Yet beneath its radical appearance, the work leaves an uneasy aftertaste: rather than confronting female obedience, it seems to aestheticise it, presenting it as a refined object without addressing its structural core.
The action unfolds in a domestic setting transformed into ritual. Censori bakes a cake, carries it to a dining room and presents it to a group of women who appear on stage as her doubles. They remain silent, immobilised within sculptural pieces designed by the artist herself: objects evoking medical devices, posture-correcting apparatuses and structures intended to keep the body in a constant state of restraint. The boundary between comfort and restriction becomes blurred, almost aesthetic. The gesture repeats without resistance. Nothing breaks. Nothing is questioned.
Although ‘BIO POP’ employs elements associated with feminist art traditions — repetition, the home, the multiplication of the female body — it avoids taking a political stance. It represents subordination but does not confront it. It reproduces dynamics of control while its narrative claims to be analysing them. That critical distance, essential for the work to function as denunciation, never fully materialises.
The women appear as interchangeable figures, voiceless and anonymous, supporting the composition rather than challenging it. In contrast, Censori occupies centre stage, fully visible and endowed with authorship. This visual hierarchy is significant: a work that claims to examine the construction of domestic roles cannot rely on the silence of those embodying those roles without reinforcing the very logic it purports to question.
The reading becomes even more complex when considering the public context surrounding the artist. The work features a soundtrack composed by Kanye West, whose relationship with Censori has been publicly framed by narratives of control and domination. When an artwork presents female bodies as still, ritualised and silent — and its sonic structure comes from a figure associated with controversial power dynamics — the result stops being an abstract gesture. The piece absorbs that context, whether it intends to or not.
At the centre of the ritual is the cake, conceived not as nourishment but as offering. The kitchen is elevated to the status of altar, and domestic labour becomes liturgy. Yet the work never identifies who receives that offering or who benefits from the ritual. Servitude is presented as devotion, and devotion as ascension. But ascension without redistribution is not transformation; it is continuity.
The project also unfolds through an ambitious narrative structure. Following ‘BIO POP’ will come chapters titled CONFESSIONAL, BIANCA IS MY DOLL BABY, STARBABY, BONE OF MY BONE, GENESIS and BUBBLE, a sequence moving through confession, sacrifice, rebirth and ascension. The progression proposes a predefined, almost messianic evolution, without showing how the work intends to dismantle the dynamics it depicts. Duration does not equal depth.
The final result is a visually immaculate proposal, precise in its spatial construction and fully aware of its aesthetic impact. Yet this sophistication coexists with a fundamental absence: the work avoids confronting power, treating it as a formal motif rather than a real structure shaping the lives of millions of women. ‘BIO POP’ displays obedience; it does not dismantle it. It reiterates domesticity; it does not transform it. It is a carefully produced spectacle that, by avoiding an interrogation of its own foundations, stops short of the critique it seems to promise.
