<< Incredible Indelible Invisible Man

Two-hour site-specific durational performance, Highways Performance Space, September 2005

SHORT DESCRIPTION: Using lotsa body paint (and skin?!), this durational site-specific installation references ethnographic displays of "savages" at fin-de-sičcle World's Fairs, butoh, blackface, Beijing performance artists, among others.

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LONG DESCRIPTION:

Gesture:

In reference to the ethnological displays at the World’s Expos during 1913-37, in which racial “Others” were put on display (complete with huts, nudity and “savagery” for the edification of Western tourists; basically it was a “freak show” with Oriental oddities and African savages, etc...:

Hour one:

Nude Asian man with shaved head (me) sitting cross-legged in a corner on top of some white substance (confectionary sugar?) within Highway’s white gallery space— facing a corner (left or right), next to the white walls on the white floor slowly painting his entire body (with his hands) with white body paint.

Hour two:

Nude Asian man with shaved head (me) sitting cross-legged in a corner within Highway’s “black box”— facing a corner (left or right), next to the black curtains, on the black floor slowly painting his entire body (with his hands) with black body paint.

Ideas:

“The Incredible Indelible Invisible Man” is titled after Ralph Ellison’s novel, “The Invisible Man.” Or maybe “Karma Chameleon” after the Culture Club song.

Mainly, I am interested in issues around race and representation, and binaries.

For the white body painting gesture, I was interested in white as a color of mourning in some Eastern cultures (as well as referencing Butoh), and white as a color of purity within Western constructs. Terms that came to mind: “whitewashing.”

For the body painting gesture with black paint, I am interested in yellow and black race relations. What does it mean for an Asian man to put on “blackface”? Yellow and black race relations in the US has been posited upon a binary axis: during the Civil Rights era (70's) Asians were deemed as “model minorities” while African Americans are sometimes portrayed by the media as a threat.

Scientific racism at the turn of the twentieth century also put Asians and blacks on opposite ends of a spectrum: blacks were hypersexual and had the lowest intelligence while Asians were relatively asexual with the highest intelligence, while whites occupied the middle, the ideal balance.

In thinking about the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992 (in which Korean Americans and African Americans were pitted against each other, without acknowledging the white power structure which created problematic social conditions), I want to explore how racial stereotypes pervade, how different minority groups are racialized (Asians are in the middle on this white/ black racial spectrum; currently Asians are more closely “aligned” with whites on the socio-political power hierarchy), and also examine possibilities for inter-ethnic coalition building. I want to tease out this idea of political and representational invisibility (within mass media and public discourse, of both Asian Americans and African Americans).

The formal qualities of the piece (nude Asian man with shaved head) also parodies ideas of performance art, especially recent political performance work done by Beijing performance artists (Zhu Ming, etc...) who are invariably nude and without hair and doing “absurd” gestures. But I also wanted to render the Asian male body visible, which is often emasculated and invisible within mass media. The Asian male is either a kung fu master or a geeky nerd. Within historical discourse, the Asian male is invariably a degraded, decadent sexual threat or impotent and emasculated.

The black paint also can reference oil (war for oil) and the minority bodies and socio-economically disadvantaged bodies put on the line, or tar (as in tarring and feathering ).