Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Zheng Bo

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Tony Cokes

Alex Da Corte

Jeremy Deller

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Rei Hayama

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

AKI INOMATA

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Joan Jonas

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Amy Lien

Quỳnh Lâm

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Takeshi Murata

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

Thao Nguyen Phan

Wong Ping

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Ingrid Pollard

Walid Raad

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph

James Richards

Robert Sandler

Aki Sasamoto

Jacolby Satterwhite

Shimabuku

Tiffany Sia

Julian Simmons

P. Staff

Angela Su

Martine Syms

Kenneth Tam

Maria Taniguchi

Luke Willis Thompson

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Juria Toramae

Su-Mei Tse

Kawita Vatanajyankur

Isaac Chong Wai

Luke Ching Chin Wai

WangShui

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Peter Fischli & David Weiss

TJ Wilcox

Kiss of the Rabbit God (兔兒神)

2022
Grammy Nominee, Best Music Video Category, 62nd Annual Grammy Awards
2020
Sundance Screenwriters & Directors Lab Fellow
SFFILIM Westridge Grant Recipient

2019
IFP Recipient, No Borders U.S. Features Section, The Independent Filmmaker Project
Film Independent Screenwriters & Directors Lab Fellow
K Period Media Fellowship Grant Recipient

2013
Webby Award Winner “People’s Voice,” Music Video Category, 17th Annual Webby Awards
Best New Director, UK Music Video Awards
Twenty-Five New Faces of Independent Film, Filmmaker Magazine

Andrew Thomas Huang is a Chinese American visual artist and film director known for his music videos for artists Björk, FKA twigs and Atoms for Peace. He is known for his iconic visual style, where he crafts hybrid fantasy worlds and mythical dreamscapes. In 2019, Huang was nominated for a Grammy for his music video for FKA Twigs’ 

 His films and videos have been commissioned by and exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; MoMA PS1; The Sydney Opera House, Sydney; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. With his strength in world-building, Huang continues his foray into narrative with his first feature film 

 which has received support from Sundance and Film Independent. His narrative short 

 premiered at Tribeca Film Festival 2019. 

Bjork ‘Stonemilker,’ Virtual Reality Installation

 Museum of Modern Art, New York City (2015); and 

,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015). His work has also been featured in 

, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2023); 

For further information about this artist please click 

Andrew Thomas Huang is an artist and film director who imagines worlds rooted in Chinese mythology and vernacular fantasies. Huang has established himself with the music videos he has made for artists such as Björk, FKA twigs and Atoms for Peace. In 2019 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his music video for FKA Twigs’ ‘Cellophane’. He is currently working on his first feature film, 

 (2019) is an absorbing short film that weaves together semi-autobiographic and fantastical elements to follow an ordinary Asian American restaurant worker’s extraordinary sexual awakening. It begins in a typical Californian Chinese joint, where the young employee receives the Rabbit God, who arrives as a mysterious patron. Their encounter then blossoms into an affair that opens for the young man the doors of a painful yet liberating process of knowledge and acceptance.

The Qing dynasty myth of Tu’er Shen traces the story of a Hokkien soldier who was executed for spying on his male lover. The ruler of the underworld decided that since the soldier’s crime was one of love, he would be ordained as Tu’er Shen, the Rabbit God, the patron deity of gay love.

We’d like to start by asking you to reflect on the diasporic condition and how it influences your gaze towards spaces of origin, the spaces that culturally inform your background. How do you relate to them from the specific experience of the diaspora?



 
Someone once described to me the experience of being part of a diaspora as having a ghost limb, and I thought it was very accurate. It’s like having a phantom limb, reaching back to some sort of origin that doesn’t really exist, yet you feel compelled to reach for it anyway. It’s something felt rather than seen. Also, as someone who doesn’t speak the language of my ancestry – my family speaks a Southern Chinese dialect that is dying out, which is the reason I didn’t learn this specific dialect – I think when you are severed from the language, members of any diaspora are reliant on sense memories, taste, touch and smell. I think that 

was an attempt to recreate and evoke those memories and a way to tap into a larger mythological context, as well as the instances of queerness that I could find in Chinese mythology, and bring them to life in a contemporary way.



 in relation to a trip that you took to Taiwan, where you had the chance to visit the shrine dedicated to the Rabbit God [Tu’er Shen]. Could you share a bit about that trip and your encounter with the guardian of the shrine?

 
Visiting Wei-ming Temple was really special. I fully admit that I was intimidated to go, because I had made a film about their deity and I knew that the film might come under some scrutiny. They invited me to screen it at the temple, I think from a combined level of curiosity and genuine appreciation, but also some inquisitiveness about why I had chosen that particular deity. The one critique I got from the master of the temple [Lu Wei-ming] was that he asked me if next time I could make a happier film. Which, you know, I understand; but actually that was also an awakening for me, because [I realized that] as someone born and raised in the West, race, racial issues and the identification of being a part of a larger diaspora means we face certain cultural and political issues that are maybe different from the ones you experience growing up in a more homogeneous place like Taiwan. So I don’t think I could fully expect everyone at the temple to understand the emotional place that this film was coming from, and clearly I don’t understand the full context of their world either. In the end, they gifted me a beautiful little talisman and said, ‘The Rabbit God is in this talisman, so take it.’ So I think there was genuine goodwill and appreciation from both sides.



As somebody living in the USA, and given the growing conflicts in the country and the toxicity of its public and political spheres, how do you negotiate your engagement with your multiple identities within the context of current debates in American society?



That’s a good question. I’ve been thinking a lot about how, throughout history, we’ve had situations where we have these kinds of short-lived blossoming periods of queerness – usually before some sort of political shutdown of that. I’m thinking of Weimar Germany or other moments where a period of queer blossoming is suddenly followed by extreme austerity and conservatism. I think this is a cycle that repeats. What’s happening in the US right now is incredibly embarrassing; at the same time, we have a social progressivism that is maybe also at a new height. And society is incredibly asymmetrical right now with all the wealth disparity. I guess this is my way of saying I still think visibility is really important, and as artists we still have a responsibility to be brave and make work that asserts our existence. There’s so much work to do. I’m not someone who typically attends large Pride events as I’m more introverted, I guess, when it comes to that, but I do think it’s important to always remember Pride as a movement of resistance and not just corporate rainbow flags. It’s actually meant to be a time of challenging power structures, and it’s important that we remain critical.



We’re interested in who your heroes and heroines are, who guides your positioning across these issues.



What an important question! I’m forever a fan of the filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I’m also a fan of the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, I think his work is so thoughtful and beautiful. I’m in Oslo now, so I can’t help but think of Tori Wrånes. WangShui is a brilliant artist and friend of mine who I know you’ve worked with. I’m thinking of a lot of friends, or at least internet friends, like Martine Gutierrez, Jenkin van Zyl, Lucy McRae, Rafa Esparza, Justin Shoulder and 011668. And other filmmakers like Terence Nance, Miranda July and Kahlil Joseph. I just discovered someone new recently, her name is Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and she showed an installation at the Berlin Biennale in 2022 that I thought was really incredible. The cosmological map of my influences is so vast, it’s hard to list all of them.



Alongside your heroines, it would be interesting to know who your influences are. Who are the people who helped you grow into who you’ve become as an artist?



Well, if we’re going to talk big influences, I have to list some pop culture sources, so Jim Henson and the Muppets, as well as the fantasy films he made in the 1980s, when they started to become more interior and mystical and strange. Those films got me into puppetry and filmmaking in general. Also, the Muppets are totally queer.

There’s something about the idea of making something up in a frame and performing a character by proxy, and not actually having to show my image, that became an entryway into theatre, film and art making. That really changed me. I also grew up loving films by Terry Gilliam, and Tim Burton’s early work. Chris Cunningham’s work, too, has been a north star for me. One of my favourite films of all time is 

 (1992) by Sally Potter. That film is incredible; it took her nine years to make it. I would say that film alone is something that has been really influential for me. Also, Sergei Parajanov is a massive influence.



We’re huge fans as well. We’re currently working towards showing his works in two exhibitions – the films and also the collages. We’re collaborating with the museum in Yerevan that takes care of his estate.



 (1965) is really special to me, and of course 

When did you first watch those films, at what time in your life?



 until maybe 2018, and I’ve seen parts of 

(1985). I know there are more films that I haven’t seen, but I love his language, his logic, and the world.



You also work across scenes and economies, and worlds. You’re also hugely successful in the music video industry. How does this work in terms of your creative process, what’s the relationship between your different personas?



 
Speaking of cosmological influences, I’ve been a fan of Björk since I was twelve, so it’s been an honour to work with her and continue to learn from her. I think straddling multiple industries is a blessing, I feel very privileged to do it. It can feel a little lonely sometimes because – I’m sure you witness this as curators as well – trying to merge disparate things in different, distinct economies that aren’t suited or designed to fit together is kind of exhausting. For example, fashion film is rarely successful. That doesn’t mean we don’t have successful fashion films, it’s just that, as an economy, the fashion world often moves too quickly to allow a well-done fashion film to be made. And I would say that’s increasingly the case with music videos, too. I think music videos are far from dead, they’re still very much alive, but the economy has become ever faster and cheaper. I also think that fewer musicians are capable or willing to collaborate these days – not like how they did in the 1990s – which is why I’ve been doing them less. The music industry is super violent in its demand for content all the time. I’m so grateful for my collaborations, they’ve taught me so much about what it means to be an artist. But when it comes to my own work, film is my main priority.

I’m still on my quest to make my movie. The studio that was going to fund it decided to pull the plug in May. It’s a film I’ve been working on for seven years, and now I have to start over. It’s really challenging, but I’m more determined than ever, and every discipline I work in is a lesson in being adaptive to what resources you have. It took Sally Potter nine years, so what’s another two? What’s another, you know, five? I guess, to answer your question, I’m enriched by every kind of vector of sphere that I work in, and it’s what keeps me excited and engaged.



Do you feel there’s a distinction pertaining to how, in the more commercial world, there are more compromises to be made, while in your visual arts practice there’s more of a space of freedom? Or do you not necessarily see it that way?



I think there’s some truth to that. I think that’s why I continue to make fine art, because there are times I’m so tired of the compromises. I don’t even know if it’s always compromises – sometimes it’s just that the commercial world requires a certain strategy, to raise money. Well, actually, all spheres require such a strategy to navigate, but there’s an art to dealing with corporate funding or studio funding, particularly in the commercial world. I hope that that enriches fine art, because it reminds you of the power structures that control what we make. I think art can be enriched by these other practices of working in other politics and other economies.



 
What else are you working on at the moment?



I’ve been writing a lot. Writing has forced me to slow down. One thing is just reinventing my movie with the budget in mind. But I’m also doing other narrative writing projects in order to grow. I need a different garden. When it comes to visual art, I really love the immediacy of it, but writing for me is becoming more of a long-term investment, and it can spawn even more visual work. If I have a story that I can live by and die making, then I’ll have years’ worth of visual work to make. So I’ve been thinking a lot more about poetry and the written word and how important that is to me; growing up, and earlier in my career, I didn’t have the confidence, but I think now I do.

I continue to draw almost every day in some form, and I’m talking to musicians about maybe doing some collaborations. But I’m very picky. I’ve written and sold a television show that has similar themes to 

, except with a whole world full of young diasporic heroes. And there are many more mythological gods and ghosts in this world, so I hope that gets made. I’ve also been thinking a lot more about the performing arts. I’ve been taking clown classes because it seems the only appropriate way to deal with the insanity of the present. I think there’s a lot to be learned from comedy and from returning to a child’s state, which is the ultimate gift of clown work.



Well, I met an instructor from Lithuania. She grew up in a circus and she also studied butoh. She’s also a psychotherapist, and she leads a number of courses that usually have the aim of getting you into a psychedelic trance state without drugs. You can do private lessons or group lessons, and we meet at a mountaintop at dusk. One of the courses was on sexual slapstick and about the history of sex work and comedy and how the two are very closely linked. She’s already taught us so much. For example, I didn’t know this, but apparently the original butoh theatre movement was funded by a group of performers who ran strip clubs in Tokyo. As someone who’s been very shy about being on camera or in front of people, it’s been very liberating, and I’m invested right now in growing and trying new things because I have to, to stay excited.

That’s a great question! The actor who played the lead character is Teddy Lee. He struck me immediately because he’s just so romantic and had the sensitivity needed to play that character. The actor who played the Rabbit God, his name is Jeff Chen, also so talented. I’m grateful to them both for allowing me to be vulnerable with them and vice versa. I had never shot something this personal before and also never shot anything that involved physical intimacy on-screen. The scene where they meet in the back room and make love was actually filmed out in the middle of a street – we had to tent it off and make it look like it was night-time. You could hear traffic, and the actors had to pretend that all these distracting stimuli were not there. It was also rushed; we didn’t have a lot of time. Obviously, some time has passed now, and I look back at the film and see all these things, like what if we had taken more time in certain moments or framed things differently? But also, part of the vulnerability of making art is making choices and exhibiting the work and making mistakes publicly. There are things that I wished I could revise, but at the same time this film was a learning experience for me, and if anything, the biggest lesson was how intimate and vulnerable this work is. Making 

 took so much out of me emotionally, and it’s so rewarding because of how close it is to me. I’m very grateful to those two actors for holding that space for me.

You’ve talked about how there’s a border crossing, the breaking of a taboo, when you introduce the knife, the idea of self-infliction or self-flagellation.



Yes. The master at Wei-ming shrine said that self-harm goes against filial piety, so it’s kind of frowned upon in the Taoist perspective. I didn’t know that. I’m definitely humbled by that correction. But maybe that’s also where there was a collision of cultural contexts. I really hate gore and violence on-screen, so I initially didn’t like the idea of the character cutting himself (and I hope no one thinks that I advocate self-harm). But then it just kind of made sense poetically: his flesh is a door, and the knife is the key to opening it so that he can reclaim his body for the first time in a world that has historically denied him access to it. By transgressing his own skin, literally, in the auto-erotic sense, he is penetrating himself as a way of becoming deified, and the Rabbit God is there as a witness to hold his hand through it. That was a moment of both poetic and literal border crossing; a cultural collision where I appreciated the education, and at the same time, having the freedom to make erotic work and make work that’s transgressive is maybe something that could only have come about from growing up in the West and absorbing Western literature and art. So I’m still proud of the narrative choice, but I also respect that education and information from the temple.

You mentioned poetry: building on our previous question about your heroines and influences, it would be great to hear about some of your literary references and the poetry that has shaped your path.



The first person who comes to mind is Toni Morrison. I read 

 (1970), her first novel, when I was fifteen, and it was a huge racial awakening for me; she named something I had always felt but never quite vocalized, and she did it so perfectly. As for my other literary heroes … a book that I loved was 

(1987) by Bruce Chatwin, about walking and being able to psychically map your environment through singing. Anne Carson’s 

 (1998) is a great one. I’m a huge fan of the contemporary writerAkwaeke Emezi. Her book 

 (2018) I highly recommend. I’m also a huge fan of someone I’m collaborating with right now, her name is K-Ming Chang. She’s Taiwanese American and she’s co-writing my movie with me. Her novel 

 (2021) is phenomenal. I think she’s a genius. Think that’s what comes to mind right now.

Biographies

Andrew Thomas Huang 

Kiss of the Rabbit God

screening

In 2011, I went to a group exhibition somewhere in Los Angeles, at a space whose name I can’t recall and which no longer exists. The only work I remember seeing that night was Kenneth Tam’s video 

The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force

, and I’ve never forgotten it. In my memory, it played in its own room, upstairs in a house, and I sat on a bench and watched the whole thing several times. In the video, Kenneth Tam, an Asian American man wearing a red flannel shirt, jeans, and sneakers, walks around a large cardboard box on the carpeted floor of a room. There is a man in the box who speaks in a flinty voice. They met on Craigslist. The Man in the Box negotiates with Tam: 

Take your clothes off, come closer, let me touch your butt, I want to grasp your genitalia

. We see only his arms, which he puts through holes he cuts in the box. Tam circles, hesitates, gets close to the outstretched hand, then backs up. He becomes naked below the waist, then puts his underwear back on. The Man in the Box makes a forced laugh whenever Tam says no to a request, which Tam does often. You can feel the Man in the Box’s pervy frustration through the cardboard.

You worry a little bit for Tam as the Man in the Box pokes his finger in between Tam’s butt-cheeks, reaches out to hold his junk. It’s at once threatening and cringe, menacing and pathetic. The intimacy, the reach for intimacy, only unshadows the bare alienation and unwieldy distance between the two men. You tell yourself that Tam is in control – it’s his camera, his situation, his art – and you wonder at the kink of it, at who is getting off more. How do these kinks feed on each other? About the work, Tam writes on his website: ‘After repeated discussions [on Craigslist], we ultimately agreed upon a set of conditions that attempted to satisfy both of our respective needs. His frustrated intentions quickly came into tension with my own refusal to fully acquiesce to his demands, yet at the same time my prerogatives as an artist required me to compromise my position and meet him halfway.’

The acutely uncomfortable vibe that pervades this video, as it does all of Tam’s work, has to do with this sticky point of collapse between refusal and acquiescence, of desires as demands, of satisfaction measured through tension, of the mild but oppressive suffering that lives in between awkward pauses, what lurks in what is not said.

In a word, it’s the ick that is the negotiation of masculine sociality. No other artist does this ick better. As his work has progressed since that early video of 2011 – moving from staged, performative videos like tone-poems suffused with sumptuous awkwardness, to more cinematic pieces that use edits and exquisitely coloured mise-en-scène to propel a muscular logic of storytelling – Tam has become his generation’s most fearless documentarian of the fact that masculinity structures our very world through this ick. It is the ick of how the softest, most hesitant parts of individuality are squashed and shaped through forceful, even brutal, concessions of socialization; and that this is not a side effect but the most necessary function of how masculine sociality is constituted at all. The ick comes from how one’s willingness to participate in this concession is the badge of honour with which masculinity rewards all of us forced to live under its regime. It’s the system that funnels everyone into hierarchical types, and then commends those whom it deems to fall into the type at the top (the leader, the alpha). In Tam’s work, we watch this negotiation of hierarchy, of dominance and submission, of leader and follower – whose hesitation or vulnerability can be steamrolled by someone more certain, more ruthless – and this plays out in situations Tam has pointedly constructed to always put the body on the line. The vulnerability of his male performers is enacted through various stages of nudity, or close proximity, or prompts to be tender and open towards each other. It is so visceral, it thumps in your throat while you watch. You feel as if insecurity is how men know they have bodies at all: there’s the embarrassment of having to live inside the body, the uneasiness of where to put one’s hands, how to hang one’s arms, how to stand in such a way as to appear – but never actually to 

Tam has always asked the question: How do men become men? Each Tam video work focuses on rituals that produce specific masculinities: father–son bonding (s

, 2020, originally a performance), male social clubs of the kind that gather in suburban basements (

, 2016). Throughout these works, he lets the question move from how much of this loss of autonomy is one’s choice, to how much it is the result of an individual bending and breaking under external pressures. From there, the question becomes how and why these external pressures came to be. Does anyone enjoy them? Who needs them? What do they cost us? How, and why, is this price not the same for each of us? How is it determined by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality? The fact of this price means that there is always the threat of violence, and Tam’s work is atmosphered with it, producing the fog of the question: Why does masculinity invest in rituals of violence as a way to get to intimacy?

Tam’s work does not offer declarative answers to any of these questions. Instead, he creates situations, images, and symbols that show how masculinity builds itself atop a foundation of boundaries being breached, or in danger of being breached. I think of how the idea of the boundary itself – a wall, a barrier, a membrane – feels especially constitutive of the masculine, insofar as the boundary functions as a thing to be destroyed, the thing towards which a penetrative force is aimed and propelled. Forgive my cis-heterosexual gender essentialism but, when I watch Tam’s work, I cannot stop thinking of how, when individual identity is constantly repressed for the benefit of the group – so that the group 

 the group – it produces a world where any moment of gentleness, trust, and connection is predicated on the awkward. Such moments function as wayward instances of consensual penetration; tender, shy emotion allowed to spurt through. Tam is a master at revealing the expression of this awkwardness, how risky anything sensitive, anything careful, is in this world. When the men in his videos are asked to compliment each other, you feel as though you’re watching someone carve out his own heart with a blunt blade and then ask if anyone might want to hold it.

When I watch Tam’s work, I think, ‘Is this gay?’ And then I realize that this is the exact question masculinity asks itself all the time. The threat of queerness is everywhere in a Tam piece, like an id, an elephant in the room, a Higgs boson particle that holds everything together but is unseen and can’t be measured with normative instruments. All of his male performers – who are unrehearsed, unscripted, and who, Tam makes a point to note, participate in the work not only for the money but because of their own interests and curiosities – seem very straight and very cis, but not necessarily by choice or desire. This sits on their frames just as awkwardly as tenderness does. It recalls the strings attached to puppets: the puppet master’s hands loom above, enacting the choreography of the patriarchy, and it’s the gracelessness as such of the puppets’ movements that gives them grace. The straight-cisness of these men is simply another aspect of their masculinity that seems to have been forged in the furnace of patriarchy’s hegemonic machinations – they’ve been burned by it, branded. When one man in 

, the video work about the high school prom, admits to wishing his prom date had been the girl’s best friend, who was a boy, it comes as a shock. There you are! I said to the screen.

, a two-channel video work from 2022, is Tam’s most cinematically accomplished video and also the most overtly queer in its symbolism. It proposes the figure of the Asian cowboy, what he might look and be like, what he might mean. Possibly the most redolent archetype of straight-cis masculinity, the cowboy can never not be camp – there is his colossal chin carved as if from stone, the legs splayed around a heaving animal, that walk that is all pelvis! – and Tam’s Asian cowboys are outlandishly camp. The dudes in the video are dressed like the Marlboro Man, though the costume seems ill-fitting against their non-white skins. They ride a mechanical bull in front of a fuchsia sound-stage sunset, and it made me think of how utterly unnecessary but very, very fun bull-riding must be. Their wavering voices speak towards prompts Tam has given them to describe sensuality, and again, we watch moments of tenderness ejaculate onto the scene in smears of gawky unease. These are interspliced with a long tracking shot through a mining tunnel, and then there are cuts to an Asian male dancer, deftly moving his body in the street.

, and pushes it into new territory for Tam in its engagement with a historical event, is a voiceover of a fictional text Tam wrote trying to imagine the first-person perspective of a Chinese labourer during the Transcontinental Railroad strike of 1867.

This text is fiction because, as Tam has noted in talks about the work, there are no first-person accounts from the Chinese workers themselves. There are only accounts from the rail company or white laborers, and Tam wanted to feel into this invisible history, let it hover in the air of those fuchsia sunsets that glow behind some of our most primary myths. By setting up this juxtaposition of the mythic Asian cowboy next to the ‘manifest destiny’ of the American dream that is always powered by racialized slave labour, 

 brings us again to a close, squirming encounter with that primary mechanism of how any individual’s assimilation into a group is always an index of how much of themselves they must lose – but here it reveals the site of this encounter as a place of fiction, a storytelling device, a mythos of the fantastical speculation that is the spine of society’s most intractable beliefs.

What I mean is: Men aren’t platonically real, born that way, determinedly pure quintessences, no matter how much they insist they are. They are formed – we form them – as much as any identity. For all its taciturn silence, refusal to emote, and smothering of expression, masculinity is one of the loudest storytellers that’s ever been, and its favourite subject is itself. In fact, what masculinity as storyteller does best is to make every character, every subject, every scene, every trope become a reflection, either affirmative or negative, of its own function, secondary to the telling of its own tale. This is why identity is always defined by its relationship and proximity to the myth masculinity tells about itself: You’re either one of us, or you are Other.

What Tam’s work has made me understand, though, is that masculinity gets off the most on declaring that no one has guaranteed entry into its club. It is the kink of masculinity that a huge entry fee must be exacted from 

 trying to get in, and masculinity as such is the enforcement of this entry fee at every door – even, or especially, at sites that were never doors to begin with. Masculinity is the telling of its own story in such a way that every site of encounter, of possible connection, has been transformed into a threshold to be crossed, a boundary to be breached, an innocent to be conquered, a door with a lock and a price. The preferred method of payment is the currency of ick. How much of yourself are you willing to sell to get in? How much of your soft neck are you willing to let be crushed by the heavy boot of the group? Through Tam’s work, I understand that we are never only the soft neck being crushed, nor are we only the line of boots bearing down upon it – we are all of us the fact of masculinity making us become the meeting place of these two. What happens there, what is produced under that terrible pressure, what we tell ourselves it means: this is society as men have written it. Ick!

Notes

Ick! How Men Become Men: On Kenneth Tam

Silent Spikes

Multidisciplinary artist Kang Seung Lee has long been concerned with the creation of various rituals of celebration and mourning, largely of queer past lives. Though the material form that these rituals have taken has shifted over time – from painstakingly rendered drawings to delicateembroideries, and, most recently, performance, sound and moving image – a core intention has always remained throughout Lee’s works: to enact a practice of caretaking and recovery.

Delving into the lives of artists and cultural makers who have all sadly – and prematurely – passed away, Lee pushes against the limits of the archive by forming, in his own words, ‘relationships with the living and with the dead’

 These relational, affective and spiritual encounters imbue his artworks with an air of reverence and a feeling of loss, while also inviting us into a space of yearning and possibility.

(2023), a small group of contemporary collaborators embody the legacy of a dancer and choreographer from another place and time, and all of them cross paths with other artists at Lee’s invitation. Like in many of his other works, Lee here performs a sort of resuscitation, not of a personhood but of the essence of their life’s work, simultaneously merging different historical, geographical and cultural scenes through a process of fabulation and visual storytelling.

Eliel Jones:
Though I have always recognized a sort of performativity present throughout your practice, I was really excited to see dance appear in 

. You sought to bring back to life the practice of Goh Choo San (1948–1987), a pioneering Singaporean-born choreographer who, despite having choreographed and performed for prominent ballet companies throughout the world, is little known in dance and cultural history. How did you come across him?

Kang Seung Lee:
The way I learned about his life actually speaks to the core of my work. I first encountered Goh Choo San’s work through someone else’s, which was a documentary about Mikhail Baryshnikov. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Baryshnikov was principal dancer and artistic director of American Ballet Theatre in New York City. And because he was one of the most important figures in dance at that time, a British TV channel made a documentary about him. On the other hand, in the early 1980s, Goh was an emerging choreographer, though he was quickly considered to be doing things very differently, particularly because of his focus on hand gestures; he worked with his dancers to use their hands to express emotions. Baryshnikov and American Ballet Theatre commissioned a work by Goh in 1981, titled 

. At that time, Baryshnikov and the dancers of ABT were doing a lot of rehearsals with Goh, and so he appears briefly in the documentary. I first watched the documentary maybe fifteen years ago, and saw this incredibly flamboyant Asian person – in fact, the only Asian person in the whole documentary – talking about the piece and how he’s trying to use the male body as a focus of the work, which was also quite different from classical ballets at the time.

After watching the film, I tried to do some further research but I couldn’t find much more than a Wikipedia page. It wasn’t until 2019, when I connected with Singaporean curator and writer Binghao Wong, that I was able to get a better sense of the dance and cultural sphere in Singapore and make additional findings. During the pandemic, I was able to get in touch with Goh’s family and his best friend, Janek Schergen, who’s now creative director of the Singapore Ballet. Goh’s family is large: he had nine siblings, including his sister Goh Soo Khim, who is only a couple of years older and who’ss also a ballet dancer and co-founder of Singapore Dance Theatre (now Singapore Ballet). She’s been actively pushing to keep his legacy alive, partly through the creation of the Singapore Ballet but also by dancing Goh’s works posthumously with other dancers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Soon after, I visited Singapore to do further research at the Singapore National Archive, and I also received materials from the family and Janek. What I learned in the process is that Goh Choo San was very successful in the USA, particularly in the early and mid-1980s, so this made me really wonder why his legacy was non-existent, particularly in the queer context here in the USA today. He’s more celebrated back in Singapore, because of his family but also because of this nationalistic tendency to celebrate someone who has been successful in the West. I asked quite a few people why he might not be remembered better elsewhere, and one reason is obviously that he was this person in diaspora, so his work never really existed in one single country or place. But also, a lot of dancers, historians and critics of dance at that time were wiped out during the AIDS epidemic, so there weren’t a lot of people who were able to record and write about his work. This has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the historical citation of not only Goh’s work but also many of his peers in that generation.

EJ:
I’m interested in how you’ve approached this loss of citation as an opportunity to imagine how to cite 

you invited Brussels-based Filipina dancer and choreographer Joshua Serafin to respond to and embody Goh’s 

from 1981. You also collaborated with KIRARA, a composer and musician based in Seoul who produced the accompanying soundtrack for the piece. I find it very beautiful that the gesture of your invitation to these and other collaborators for the film is from a lens of responding to Goh’s life and practice, rather than from a desire to create a ‘straight’ re-enactment of 

as an existent piece. Your approach demands a different kind of involvement with hiswork; it calls for embodiment as a form of study. How did you approach working with your collaborators as an invitation to create their own relationships to Goh Choo San?


KSL:
From the beginning I wasn’t really interested in reperforming Goh’s works. For one thing, that’s already been done by other ballet companies. Also, I was very interested in the idea of queerness as something that is constantly in transformation, thinking here of José Esteban Muñoz and his theorizing of queer futurity as something that will always be changing. I really wanted to speak about Goh’s work in this way, in relation to queerness and how it’s constantly evolving. I felt that had to come from multiple perspectives other than my own, and by bringing in someone like Joshua, for instance – who is trained as a ballet dancer but is also a nonbinary person who is making work from that position and identity – it happened very organically. We did study Goh’s work and his process very intensely at some point. But always the invitation was towards asking ourselves, with the legacy of someone like Goh, what kind of future(s) do we want to imagine through the gestures of our bodies? I wanted to think through this question in the film as something of an embodied experience, while at the same time expressing a homage to Goh’s work as something that’s about the present and the future. In this way it became a sort of collective reimagining.

EJ:
This approach towards producing a collective reimagining of something or someone through interweaving different practices appears in your work in other ways. For 

,there are other artists with whom you collaborate outside the form of an invitation like the one you extended to Joshua and KIRARA. For instance, the title of the work itself is borrowed from a poem by Mexican writer Xavier Villaurrutia (1903–1950), and verses from that same poem appear at the beginning of the film transcribed into artist Martin Wong’s (1946–1999) American Sign Language ‘font’, which you very carefully adapted from Wong’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s. Again, to me these presences feel less like re-enactments of works and more like invocations; material and affective explorations that call the artists in question into the room, or in this case onto the screen or the stage. In the past, you’ve similarly introduced the work of other artists who never met each other in real life, and you make them correspond through your artworks in the most beautiful and poetic ways – such as in your other moving image piece in the Akeroyd Collection, 

(2018), where you bring together the work of Korean writer Joon-soo Oh (1964–1998) with that of British filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–1994). Could you talk a little bit about how you approach this process of introducing other artists’ work into your practice, and to each other?

KSL:
My collaborations have always been both with the dead and the living, because I revisit the works of artists who are no longer with us, but indeed, as you say, thinking of them as collaborators in my work. That perhaps does go back to Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, and the invitation to visit that came from Keith Collins, who was Jarman’s partner (he himself died in 2018). What I was fascinated by at that time was how the garden, which is really beautiful, comes back every year despite almost all the plants having been first planted in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The roots are there, and the plants grow back every year or every other year, and they flower. They’re not exactly the same plant, but they come from these same roots and seeds, and they’re evolving all the time. So, I was thinking about how memories and histories are sort of in transformation and being written and rewritten; how they’re moving all the time.

Similarly, I’ve always understood that our thinking or art making is influenced by people who came before us. Even when we try and make something that people call ‘original’, it actually comes from all the education we received, the books we’ve read, the knowledge that was created before us. So, it’s never just our ‘own’ in that way, it really is heavily influenced. I think I wanted to speak to that in my work, particularly in relation to queer histories. Also, histories that are not from one place: a lot of the time they’re transnational, so I’m always trying to talk about more than one person from different continents, cities, locations and how their legacies are connected through history and through people in the next generations, including myself. I think the idea of creating genealogy has always been really important, whether they’re of my generation or the ones before me; this concern has continued over different projects and collaborations.

EJ:
How do these fabulated encounters take shape?

KSL:
In a way, they often happen through a series of accidents. I’m interested in many people, and I’m doing research constantly. But they happen mostly through relationships that develop in the process. In many cases I reach out to estates, or family members or friends of the departed, and I try to establish a relationship with them and let them know what I’m trying to do. In some cases, there is trust instantly, in others it takes time to create that. It’s similar with my collaborations. Sometimes I have very strong connections; other times it takes longer.

EJ:
I think it’s possible to draw out some specific threads here. What all these artists have in common is that their work has faced or risked possible erasure due to their various marginalized positions, with the common experience among them all being that they’re all queer; many also contracted HIV and died of AIDS-related complications. In her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman reflects on her work of narrating counter-histories of slavery as having always been ‘inseparable from writing a history of present’.

This came to my mind in relation to your own work, which is not only concerned with acts of revisiting or restaging but with a desire to reflect on what’s stake in invoking these lives now. What does it mean to you to write these histories into the present?

KSL:
On the one hand, there are some functions to my work that are very practical. I always think about my own research process as a personal learning process. I do research, and I meet with these people, and I learn about people who are not with us. I’m literally learning the histories, bringing the memories out, and in some ways writing about them in the form of visual art. Because almost all my works have references to someone else’s work, whether images, writings or other forms of production, it can also introduce their work to new viewers: some people definitely learn about these other artists’ work through my work, and that’s actually a very important function that I’m aware of. There are so many artists who we think are well known but are in fact new to a lot of people. Goh Choo San is one example. For some people it’s their first encounter with his work, which I take very seriously.

I also want my work to go beyond the introduction. I want to talk about how we can turn to these artists’ practices as an invitation to imagine something – and in many ways somewhere – else. I’m interested in talking about these artists’ work as part of a conversation about the present, about the politics of our time. In this way, by rewriting and rethinking these pasts and our histories, there’s also a possibility and potentiality to create a different future. My work exists within that conceptual framework, particularly one that insists on not forgetting. Because my works take visual form, rather than being purely historical or social, I’m also asking for a different type of encounter. It’s an invitation through the visual, the poetic and, in this film, through movements made by different bodies to interrogate how and what we feel, which to me is as important as the histories that I’m bringing in. How do we live with this feeling? Sometimes this feeling can be about mourning and loss; at others it can be the feeling of different possibilities for the future. I believe both of these have the potential to change something about the future, or at least bring forth an urge to do that.

EJ:
Indeed, aside from the importance of introducing these artists to a new audience, you also ask us to think about what their loss means to us and others. How do we mourn those whom we do not know and whose experience is entirely different from ours? How do we react and respond to realities that are not immediately happening to us or the people we know, or the geographies that we’re familiar with? Who gets to be commemorated, memorialized and remembered within an affective space, and who doesn’t? I find these questions to be deeply political and urgently rooted in your work as well as our present moment. Palestine is a painful example of this right now – certainly of the starkly different standards that are applied to commiserating the loss of human life.

KSL:
Something like the AIDS epidemic really defined a generation at a particular time. I strongly believe what’s happening in Palestine is going to define us, and the ways that we are complicit now are going to be like generational trauma. I think about the unknown, the erased through my practice all the time. Even when I’m bringing in images of people who are more familiar to us, I introduce them also as an invitation to look at the others who have been less seen; the erased, the unknown, the bodies that we do not recognize or know. It’s about creating an entry point to really think about who is not actually remembered, and to ask now: who will not be remembered? But also, it’s about suggesting new possibilities and ways to remember as well. My work is an invitation to start a conversation and create that possibility. I think this is ultimately the most important process in my work for me: how we can collectively think about the unknown.

Andrew Thomas Huang

Exhibitions

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Awards

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