Text on Practice Muyang
1.
The Ruined Map is an experimental film that combines existentialist fiction, 3D animation, and distorted sound waiting in an underground station. It stems from the fetishization and sexual racism I have suffered from white men on dating apps in the Netherlands and explores the transformation of the Chinese diasporic subjectivities amid uncertainties and challenges. Finding a partner has always been a big part of my life and each long wait and many fleeting love affairs left me in a peculiar liminal situation and reinforced my strong sense of displacement and isolation.
Banana and twinkie are typical racist everyday Western epithets for East Asians who have lost their heritage. And I associate their images with the stereotypical East Asian small penis. In the animations, the objects are converted to "characters" who are repeatedly inflated and deflated, like disembodied ghosts. I arranged them in three liminal places: in darkness and mist, suspended over the ocean, and inside the bedroom. In the script part, using my memories from China and the Netherlands, I wrote a story without a single protagonist, using both fact and fiction. A disembodied queer ghost who has to enter a life of obedience to masculinity, trapped by a penis. Through a surreal, fast-paced, and hauntingly dreamlike narrative and the impossible clues found therein, I attempt to engage the audience in a reflection of (sexual) racism that lives ubiquitously in subtler ways, China’s contemporaneity and its counterfeit sense of inferiority, etc.
Next, I will explore an encounter between experimental film, queer theory, pornography, and science fiction. I am trying to portray the anus as an alien, combining the Chinese story “The Peach Blossom Spring” and gay cruising culture, and write some auto-fictional poetry about the anus.
This is a study of how relationships, represented by parts of the body, transform and restructure the context of the social and language. It is a work that started out as a question about whether the butt has the political potential to re-bind us together in a time of confusion with big and small wars. It is a work expressing the subjective and liberating potential of the anus, from the utopia represented in the Chinese story The Peach Blossom Spring to Paul B. Preciado's book Terror Anal, about the anus as a post-gendered organ.
I will study the symbolic meaning of queer and feminism that anal has, which is a democratic symbol representing all regardless of sex and gender, the sexual communist symbol of the public joy that we all experienced, the symbol of the liquidity of power from behind and from below and the various symbolic meanings of the anus.
Thoughts by Clara:
- more on other projects
- more on the practices you use to visualise your work and why you choose them (animation, film, text...)
- WHY do you want to create what you are creating
Thoughts by Yalou:
- Layered project that touch major and important issues in the world.
- I find it very beautiful how personal your work is.
- What did you do before this? I would love to hear a little more background or work from you?
- How would you describe your critical voice? I feel it is very layered
- What would you like to see and grow? And what have you learned from your passed art works? Is there anything that you would do differently?
- In your next draft it would be beautiful to see some images of your work
- Why is It important for you to use animation, 3D animation and documented footage in your films? Maybe you can clarify a bit more on your process of making? Step by step maybe
2.
The Ruined Map is an experimental film that combines existentialist fiction, 3D animation, and distorted sound waiting in an underground station. Beginning with a Christmas fireworks scene shot on a train, it seems to herald the end of an era and the dawn of a new one. What follows is a ruin, a fragmented narrative, a ruined map...
The Ruined Map is set in the context of my arrival in the Netherlands as a gay Chinese man, where I am confronted not only with the power of structural Western centrism (e.g. the fetishism and sexual racism of white men I suffer on Dutch dating apps), but also the inescapable specter of Chinese-centric oppression (Chinese etiquette and customs, state institutions, moral standards, etc.).
Finding a partner has always been a big part of my life and each long wait and many fleeting love affairs left me in a peculiar liminal situation and reinforced my strong sense of displacement and dysphoria. In the script part, I draw on my own experience as a Chinese male who grew up under the influence of Western pornography until he became a pornography translator in Rotterdam, reflecting on what Paul Preciado calls the orgasmic force - the labour forces of the pharmacopornographic age. The disobedient body, the queer body responds to the policing of the normative body, and how technology reinforces the construction of masculinity. This body was discriminated against and suffered from dysphoria from cybernetic and pharmacopornographic neoliberalism.
The original text is written in Chinese, Japanese and English, mingling like the waters of an estuary. Through a surreal, fast-paced, and hauntingly dreamlike narrative and the impossible clues found therein, the transition process from subjective scale to planetary scale is approached in a kind of linguistic chaos and instability.
Banana and twinkie are typical racist everyday Western epithets for East Asians who have lost their heritage. Such antagonized otherness in Western narratives helped manifest the “imagined Western” identification. In my mind, they also represent China’s counterfeit sense of inferiority against the powerful. Then, I associate their images with the stereotypical East Asian small penis. In the animations, banana and twinkie are converted to “characters” who are repeatedly inflated and deflated. I arrange them in three liminal places: in darkness and mist, suspended over the ocean, and inside the bedroom. They look lonely, desperate and nervous, while giving off a strange and intimate feeling, subverting the stereotypes of East Asia.
3
The real communist question is not “how to produce,” but “how to live.”
— The Invisible Committe, Now
Vous entendez ? C’est le son de votre monde qui s’écroule. C’est le son du nôtre qui se lève.
— Armée zapatiste de libération nationale, communiqué du 21 décembre 2012.
1
As a queer born in a period of high speedy urbanization and globalization in China, I have experience living in several typical immigrant cities. Instead of focusing on topics like "first-tier cities" "manufacturing industry's centers", and "surveillance", in my previous works before coming to the Netherlands, I made more efforts to the aspects of the urban-rural fringe and the queer subculture in China. The vitality of these non-mainstream lifestreams is a unique cultural attribute of Asia. Subculture is a mirror, a path, and a way to understand East Asia, which integrates and transforms the mainstream culture and art dominated by the West.
I believe the two survival modes show greater adaptability in China, both displaying some filth and dirt that need to be eradicated, and they are a necessity for the Chinese future as well. The two survival modes are usually maliciously attacked as parasites in the culture: They just demand while not paying out, weaken individuals or social institutions, and lead to chaos. I tried to tap the potential of the parasites, in the words of Michel Serres, to"generate a different order".
I do not make a binary division between art and life, but try to use the aesthetic system to break the boundary between them, to achieve the redistribution of the sensible (Jacques Rancière). In my art, I wish to use localization as a method to explore the local context (political, cultural, historical, etc.) of my subject's life journey to reconstruct a personal discourse/counter-discourse that does not exist under the mainstream/hegemonic discourse framework, as a way to respond to my own existential anxiety.
2
My video work An Artist Who Only Participates in Group Exhibitions arouse from the sudden A4 Revolution, the biggest protest in China since 1989. The government's endless Zero-COVID Policy, the accompanying economic downturn, the collusion between the government and the covid-test industry, and many other problems caused the people to raise the A4 blank papers in protest. The strict censorship of the Communist Party led to the people only being able to hold up blank papers in protest.
Two days later, as the mist filled Rotterdam and Chongqing, my friend sent me a video of the mist in Chongqing. The future was uncertain, like raised white paper interrupting our lives. Also, as a non-white queer artist, I came to Rotterdam experiencing a long period of a liminal state of exhaustion, lost in translation and waiting, not only because of the experienced censorship of the Chinese Communist Party but also because of whiteness in the art world. The blank paper is a ghost in our lives and in art, always ignored and linked to the liminal space of unconscious processes of waiting, refusal, and turning, containing an infinite amount of unwritten ghost texts and creative potential (here pointing to the ghostly presence in Georges Perec's writing, with its mass of pre-determined, unresolved, wavering and agenda-like remnants of notes).
I got inspired by the spectrum of anarchist thought represented by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. The political and intellectual movements they initiated in Europe had a countercultural form that supported insurrection and social organizations that used people and the forces of production to go beyond the means of representative democracy. I fictionalize the blank paper as a parasitic artist who can only participate in group exhibitions(also the sub-medium proposed by Boris Groys), a proletariat in revolt against art capitalism. Using only a misty video of Chongqing sent to me by my friend, I depict a post-futuristic dystopia in the video: because everything is in ruins, the only way forward is a sort of anarchic return to nature(the blank paper state), on the run from all systems of control.
3
The Ruined Map is an experimental film that combines existentialist fiction, 3D animation, and distorted sound waiting in an underground station. Beginning with a Christmas fireworks scene shot on a train, it seems to herald the end of an era and the dawn of a new one. What follows is a ruin, a fragmented narrative, a ruined map...
The Ruined Map is set in the context of my arrival in the Netherlands as a gay Chinese man, where I am confronted not only with the power of structural Western centrism (e.g. the fetishism and sexual racism of white men I suffer on Dutch dating apps), but also the inescapable specter of Chinese-centric oppression (Chinese etiquette and customs, state institutions, moral standards, etc.).
Finding a partner has always been a big part of my life. Each long wait and many fleeting love affairs left me in a peculiar liminal situation and reinforced my strong sense of displacement and dysphoria. When writing the script, I draw on my own experience as a Chinese male who grew up under the influence of Western pornography until he became a pornography translator in Rotterdam, reflecting on what Paul Preciado calls “the orgasmic force” - the labor forces of the pharmacopornographic age. The disobedient body, the queer body responds to the policing of the normative body, and how technology reinforces the construction of masculinity. This body was discriminated against and suffered from dysphoria from cybernetic and pharmacopornographic neoliberalism.
The original text is written in Chinese, Japanese, and English, mingling like the waters of an estuary. Through a surreal, fast-paced, and hauntingly dreamlike narrative and the impossible clues found therein, the transition process from subjective scale to planetary scale is approached in a kind of linguistic chaos and instability.
Banana and twinkie are typical racist everyday Western epithets for East Asians who have lost their heritage. Such antagonized otherness in Western narratives helped manifest the “imagined Western” identification. In my mind, they also represent China’s counterfeit sense of inferiority against the powerful. Then, I associate their images with the stereotypical East Asian small penis. In the animations, bananas and twinkies are converted to “characters” who are repeatedly inflated and deflated. I arrange them in three liminal places: in darkness and mist, suspended over the ocean, and inside the bedroom. They look lonely, desperate, and nervous while giving off a strange and intimate feeling, subverting the stereotypes of East Asia.