"Orlan chose Mona Lisa, Botticelli's Venus, Diana, Psyche and Europa as the icons from which to compose her new identity as a woman because she loved their images. She did not want to resemble them visually, but she admired and wanted to associate herself with the qualites of their character - androgyny, carnal beauty, temerity and aggressivity, fragility and vunerability and fascination by adventure and the future. To Orlan, her female icons were (homosexual) love objects she could not personally know, but who have certainly played a part in the ongoing construction of her identity as a woman."Kate Ince, 2000
