piping, hot glue, flame retardant plastics, three-channel projection
production assistants: cole slater, katie luo, katrina meng, ann hoang
installed at Human Resources Los Angeles, July 2022
From the sensor to the frame to the projection and screen, ideological and media apparatuses have privileged the representation of particular modes of being and subjectivities (Man/Human) through normative encodings and relational alignments of these perspectival apparatuses and sites. The piece purposely misaligns these sites to attend to the aesthetic and affective excesses of those that cannot be contained by coherent or legible representational apparatuses.
The piece draws on aesthetic logics and traditions of shanshui painting and features hanging scrolls constructed with flame retardant plastics and projections, a questioning of the racialization of matter and politics of disposability via a reordering of the relation between figure and ground as articulated by philosopher Yuk Hui's Art and Cosmotechnics (2020).
The projected animations are recursively made video assemblages of the artist with minor color corrections, reflecting on how notions of race and gender are technologically encoded and of processes of self-orientalization, drawing on the techno-ornamental trope of the commercialized-architectural-holographic-cybernetic Asiatic femme found in science-fiction and cyberpunk anime and films such as Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Ghost in the Shell, Cloud Atlas. The textures, a combination of video and generative visuals, tend to the replicability and plasticity of this figure in hopes of finding queer kin and solidarities in unexpected sites.
Special thanks to Dave Lopez.
