Clothing as Vessel

Bruno Zhu (BZ), Ming Lin (ML)

At a group dinner with young Portuguese artists last summer, the following happened. We were chatting about being artists in Portugal and when the conversation shifted to professional “success”, one of them turned to me and said: “You’re successful because you’re a chink and identity politics are so trendy right now.” I was silent, experiencing a sort of collapse in my head. This had come from a self-styled anti-fascist and anti-racist person that went to BLM marches. A white, middle-class guy, for whom being an artist is like, you know, radical or rebellious. I couldn’t believe this anti-racist, someone I considered a peer, had called me “chink” thinking it was provocative in a funny way. I had always thought of myself as well assimilated within my friend circles, no matter how contentious that term can be. I surely do try my best—so had I been delusional all this time thinking that I was a banana? Like, if I was truly the banana I say I am, I wouldn’t have found that offensive. But I did! It’s sad and also astonishing to me that I did! I’ve been at odds with what representation can do, how vulnerable and easily co-opted it is. After that dinner, I was left with many questions about my identities. Can we embody the object that we’re expected to become while retaining a sense of resistance underneath? How not to be reduced to “trendy”, like a fixed thing that could be replaced by next year’s contemporary? Did he use a racist slur because there is too much representation of Asians, or not enough? Who gets to produce, and to turn that into a political question? Me, a member of an ethnic minority group in Portugal, or someone like him, a white Portuguese anti-racist? And for whom would this representation be for? Me, in order to dispel Western stereotypes of Asians cast onto me, or him, to create new ones about my kin?

You were the first Asian person I’d ever met to claim your banana identity, which at the time felt quite inspiring and liberating. I think you literally said something like “I’m the whitest Asian boy in Europe,” so also owning your whiteness in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way. Your reticence to engage in the identity politics conversation so readily, especially when media consumes and cannibalizes things, resonates with me and reminds me of the one time that I was ever called a banana, which was by another so-called banana on Instagram. It was quite startling because I considered this person woke enough I guess, and was surprised that they had taken the sentiment that I had expressed there totally out of context, and felt strongly enough to resort to racial slur. But then I was like, well I guess this is precisely where these conversations get diluted and misconstrued and really isn’t where we should be hashing out such debates… But then again, I’m still not sure where else to do so. But I think during Covid, and in light of the uprisings in the US and the reverberations elsewhere, a lot of mixed sentiments, among Asian diaspora, have been stirred. I wonder if now, more than before, you have faced moments where you’ve had to contend with your identity and the ways in which it is instrumentalized within your industry?

The issue of race has only been brought up since I started working on the project in my parents’ shop. It kind of gives a genealogy to my work by situating it. It eases the understanding of my solo work for many people, because I have a very random and diverse body of work—photography, installation, textile, writing—and nothing really addresses a centralized subject matter. There’s a lot about desire, but the notion of desire is vague and ephemeral, so people are like, what does that really mean? I don’t go on about being a queer artist either—so then what is it? For a lot of people the shop project helps frame my work under the aesthetics of consumption. Suddenly “Bruno is addressing the commodified self, and the commodified self has these layers of identity that are racialized because it’s a business run by an immigrant family coming from China…” I don’t feel my work has been pigeonholed by my identity yet. I’m aware it could happen, not avoiding it either. I’ve noticed how my presence has affected some people now that they’ve experienced a “woke wave”. They are seeing me with new eyes, you can almost sense it. They look at me like, “I have to tell myself that he’s not only an artist, he’s an Asian artist, but he’s also Portuguese.” You can tell they’re making maps in their heads. It’s funny because when they hear me talk, I don’t mention any of it. My background is completely banal. My family didn’t immigrate because of political narratives usually tied to newsworthy migrant stories. For many people then it becomes easy to forget my ethnic background. It also shows how many people associate racialization with something that’s morally bad or tragic only.

To me your work is quite autobiographical even when this is not being literally narrated. I think one of the ways we came in contact was through our respective shop work. I was occupying a shop in Hong Kong as a kind of experiment in inhabiting infrastructure, and you were starting work on the project at your parents’ shop that you grew up in. Very different registers and angles I think, but one of the things I remember distinctly was you telling me about experiencing racism at A Maior as a child, where slurs were directed at your parents, which they could not understand, but which you obviously could, which subsequently cultivated a sense of shame for you, to which maybe they were oblivious. But I’m thinking about the use of language in your work. On the shop project’s website, you use imprecise translation tools to have it be bilingual. I think this decision to experiment with and not be too precious or militant about language standardization is interesting, and I wonder if it is significant for you?

I’m basically the result of terrible parenting. My parents only taught me the Wenzhounese dialect. They never bothered to teach me Mandarin. Communication with my parents has always been terrible because we don’t have a grounded common language. The amount of dialect they taught me is very limited. We only talk about essential things, like “are you hungry or not hungry, are you OK or not OK?” Because I left Portugal when I was seventeen, I never developed my critical speech form in Portuguese either. This is something I’m grappling with now when I explain my work in my home country. I feel like I’ve been denied the precision of a specific language. Then what am I really talking about when I say language? My mom is curious about what I do and wants to have deeper conversations besides “are you hungry?” So I’ve been getting on with it in broken dialect and using Google Translate to explain what performativity means to me, or the shop as a fictive model to generate new life that is not essentialist. I want her to see an open future, instead of how these shops are usually perceived locally. Chinese-owned businesses in Portugal have a reputation for selling cheap stuff: you go in for something cheap and you come out with something that will break in two minutes. They are at the bottom of the shopping chain. When I started doing shows there it was as if I wanted to reify that, owning it, wearing that label to show that even at the bottom life can still be created somehow. It’s not like I’m trying to create an entanglement of languages or produce a polyphonic linguistics in my practice. I’m not interested in that because I don’t want to aestheticise my problem. But translation becomes an exciting issue in the shop context. When we translate the soap opera summaries we use as exhibition texts, because they are very idiomatic in Portuguese they don’t seem coherent after a literal word-for-word translation to English. I love that deliberate misencounter, and the Chinese version keeps that spirit via Google Translate. Perhaps things should get lost in translation more often. Also, being gay and not out to my parents turns the idea of streamlining into a paradox, because I make versions of me for people in my private life. With my work recently becoming, inevitably, more autobiographical, I’m understanding that it’s not about streamlining a flow between languages, but rather to acknowledge the tensions between them. The inability to express leads me to express too much, so language is completely productive and generative within my work.

To talk a little bit about the role of fashion in your work, I think I previously read it as partaking in this return to your parents shop, and sort of reclaiming those cheaply-made goods you spoke of, acknowledging them as generative in a different sort of way, perhaps as charting certain channels of desire. Would this be an accurate reading?