'The lidded amphora of Me Wanking Off (1996) stands as a tour de force of his technical abilities and decorative accomplishments, all played out on a surface in which perversion is piled on perversion.' —Andrew Wilson
In Me Wanking Off, the British artist Grayson Perry exhibits various facets of a single life, vested with plural identities. As elucidated by the work’s title, and more specifically the term ‘me’, this life is his own, fantasised, imagined, and real. In certain areas, the artist is shown going about usual activities — walking on the street, standing; in others, he is portrayed enacting scenes of sexual nature, with expressions of both pain and pleasure. The work's varied surface, covered with what seems to be a continuous narrative, is interspersed with vignettes of a former life (or an imaginary realm): miniature images of childhood toys, a fairytale house, a fishing scene atop a calm, red lake. Occupying the height of one of the vase’s sides, a young female figure sticks her tongue out, chained through a number of her orifices, her eyes wide open and a single tear running down her right lid. At the top of the vessel, a gilded monkey rises, his mouth open as if screaming — perhaps in a last moment of jubilation following the act of self-pleasure. Attesting to its importance, Me Wanking Off was included in Perry’s seminal exhibition Guerrilla Tactics, which took place at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2002. For this show, the artist was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003.