Looking into People’s Eyes

I was an LGBTQ and feminist activist in China. When I moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, I struggled to bring my queerness into my work, and to transform it from an activist to an artistic form of communication. It was in early 2016 when Evan [Ifekoya], one of my queer friends on the course, invited me to try something drag. I researched drag king culture in the West. I had known drag king culture existed there since the last century, and I wanted to engage it and find my own way. How the Western drag king dealt with the face, figure and body was quite distant from me. The makeup, what’s highlighted or not, is quite racialized because most of it tries to recreate the figure of the white man, and to embody physical masculinity in a theatrical way through breast-binding, muscle drawing and mustache referencing. I also wore a mustache, but I didn’t connect with the way they were dealing with it. I had to find a personal or cultural connection. In China, in the traditional opera context, cross-dressing has a long history and does not directly reference sexuality—males playing female roles/females playing male roles—but has a completely different aesthetic. In Western images of divinity, the depiction of masculinity (and power) is muscular and angular. In Chinese opera all characters, including the males, have to be elegant and pretty: the makeup defines light and shadow and is white and pink; the face is not pointy. I wanted to bring this well-rounded beauty to challenge the definition of drag performance.

You started as a drag king after you left China. How do people perceive masculinity in China?

I really admire your ongoing work as an activist in mainland China. Considering the difficulties of doing so, what gives you such a drive?

Usually when I engage with the stereotypes, it is mainly in response to Asian people (women particularly) being ‘very submissive’, or to the racial hierarchy of masculinity in the West where Asian masculinity—no matter what the sexuality—is usually seen as either undesirable or fetishized, because these bodies are not ‘masculine’ enough in Western-dominated metrics. I engaged with this idea in M.A.C.H.O. (2019) at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which suggested a more intersectional and multi-layered approach to masculinity. The hidden violence or hierarchy is also to do with my everyday experience living in the UK: the confrontational moment, or, the straight (non-Asian) man looking at me as a sexual object. They ask “where are you really from?” as a way to start a conversation. But they don’t really care.

Food always relates to consumption. For Masculinism (2018) at Rich Mix, London, I used 10 kilos of British sausages. Queer identity in capitalism tends to deal with the surface, or is mediated through culture and race so that it becomes intangible. To make dealing with queer identity tangible, you have to deal with bodies. Food is just the other creature’s body. In this work the vegetables are plant’s bodies, and the sausages, derived from pig’s bodies, are used to construct another “ideal body”. Also the shape of a sausage looks like a penis, and sausages penetrated and filled in the masculine mannequin I wore. I'm not intentionally choosing food, but I end up working with a lot of it, especially yogurt, mushrooms, sausages and other pork products and cream.

Spanish food always has a very good, strong flavor; I love paella and jamon. People invest a lot of emotional energy in eating. I was born in South China near the seaside. People in the north are more straightforward and have more simple cuisine than in the south. I’m Cantonese so we tend to make soup following a medicinal approach. Recipes depend on seasons and body natures. Because Chinese medicine begins by differentiating people according to different bases—some bodies are hot base, some bodies are cold base. You need to know what your base is, and then combine the base with the need and the season. That gets you different kinds of soup because different things are put in; the soup itself should be boiled at least two hours. In contrast, soups in the north are just boiled. These different philosophies create the whole food culture, but the Chinese medical approach applies generally.

You presented the first Queering Now 酷兒鬧 event in February 2020 in London. You co-curated it with Sha Li, treating us to an evening of films, performances, and an after party. It was well attended, and people loved it. How was Queering Now 酷兒鬧 initiated? What's the future of the project?

I’m more interested in how you read the work. You might only recognize Freddie Mercury. You might not know the other queer idols I refer to in the piece. If I look at the work within my creative journey, it is the meeting point between the activist and artistic parts. It’s a performance that shares some social critique. There is no script. The work questions heteronormativity and how norms kill the space for queer people to survive. I feature three queer idols who have died: Freddie Mercury from AIDS, and Ellen Loo (盧凱彤) and Leslie Cheung (張國榮) from suicide. Leslie Cheung was struggling with depression and Ellen Loo was struggling with bipolar disorder. They both committed suicide by jumping from the top of a building—Ellen Loo from where she lived. They were all queer idols who had already achieved celebrity; Leslie Cheung was like a Chinese version of David Bowie, and Ellen Loo was super young, 32, and was the best female guitar player in Hong Kong. They both had loving stable partners. However, they both killed themselves. This question came from having dinner with a straight Chinese friend, who said, “I don't understand why she killed herself, given that she had everything.” And I was like, “Really? Everything?” This is the core of the problem: the standard, the norm, and the imagination projected onto stardom. Seeing that they had this life and then killed themselves. Is that really themselves killing themselves? When Ellen Loo was 23 she directed a music video for her girl band, at17. The song titled “安樂” can be interpreted as “peace” or “ease” in English; but the word 安樂 can also refer to “euthanasia”, as it’s translated in Chinese as 安樂死. In the music video she’s printed on a cardboard cutout, with closed eyes, wearing a rainbow wristband, lying on a moving vehicle. The footage was shot from the side, at an angle so that her printed body is looking upwards (with closed eyes). And the lyrics are about loneliness, emptiness, cherishing, and freedom: happiness and hope won’t reserve till the next life when everything has gone / don’t disrupt this peacefulness and coldness and don’t tarnish this beautiful scene / don’t be afraid of falling asleep alone in a dark space. Basically, the whole thing is like a funeral for herself, with the rainbow element, so we see that her reflection of queer despair comes from an early age.

Sin Wai Kin 單慧乾 (fka. Victoria Sin) invited me to work with them and perform. We developed the project together in early 2018; it's basically a project they initiated and framed. Given we both have a very strong identity in our own work, the challenge was: how would I contribute without having our identities or images clash? I worked with the dumb-bell, and the color blue from my graduation—visuals that fit perfectly, but in a completely different context. The work is about otherness and creating a narrative outside a Eurocentric dominant gaze, and how I (or we) use an othered body that carries different experiences and fights back. In the piece, Sin Wai Kin 單慧乾 mention a world famous female Chinese opera couple—Yam Kim Fai (任劍輝) and Bak Sheut-sin (白雪仙)—and uses their own image to fight the male gaze. Sin Wai Kin 單慧乾 used “she/her” to address the subject matter in the piece, but they always claim their own agency in real life—using the “they/them” pronoun, and holding a strong policy in professional negotiations. The ending scene presented multiple sexualities and sexual practices within the animal world, looking at queerness and otherness from a post-human perspective. My part, plus the voiceover, visualized violence against the queer masculine body and beyond.

Great Conversation was first presented in the Revolve Performance Festival at the Uppsala Konstmuseum in Sweden in 2017, and I then made it into a video work of around 15 minutes. It visualizes the frustration of being an Asian, or non-white, non-straight artist being put in a gallery context, being curated and looked at by the white gaze, struggling with real agency and control. On the one hand you are something that is consumed: this is why I put a frame on me—the silver thing is actually suggesting a frame. And the yellow things on my face are yellow tissues. You spend so much energy negotiating; it’s a power struggle between you and an overwhelmingly dominant system. I’m not critiquing any former partners, but I attempt to reveal the power imbalance in the Western art world that contains collectorship, colonialism, tabooism, voyeurism, hegemony, xenophobia and essentialism.

This conversation took place in London in October 2020.