Year: 1999
Medium: blue neon
Dimensions: 176 x 213 cm (69 1/4 x 83 7/8 in.)
Acquired from Phillips, 2022
Emin's works are often described as “Confession”, as she has consistently expressed her intense self throughout her career. From this perspective, this work may be categorized as one of Emin's softer works. The gentle blue neon light reveals an adorable fawn and the text above it reads, “It's what I'd like to be”. Invoking industrial aesthetics and minimalist functionality, Dan Flavin and Joseph Kosuth are the earliest artists who brought light signs into artistic expression. On the contrary, Emin transformed the image of neon art into an extremely emotional expression. Trying to re-read the text as Emin's lines, one cannot help but imagine a different nuance. The fawn may be a representation of something cute, but the text itself indicates that this attribute does not belong to Emin herself. In 1999, Emin was 36 years old, and it was the year when she was still known as an unprecedented artist who had caused a stir by getting drunk at the Turner Prize ceremony. Did she truly wish to become as innocent as the fawn at heart?
