Celestial Figurations

Inspired by the pictographic roots of the Chinese language as well as our own diasporic enmeshment as queers-of-colour, we imagined a Chinese “character” with the metaphysical and emotive properties of “queer” that are important to us, in an attempt at materializing our Queer diasporic ‘Chineseness’ through a made-up character that isn’t a Western derivative. The “emerging” sculpture that stretches our imaginations from the ground up, is our personified imagination of what this character might look like. Who are they? What are they? When are they? Where are they? Why are they? Queerness to us necessitates temporal transformation – it’s daring, it’s verbal, it’s spiritual, it’s elemental, it’s revolutionizing. 

The character was created to be deliberately and linguistically confounding/ illegible, which painfully mirrors our own desires as queer Asians in the diaspora, yearning for our cultures and lateral community acceptance that are often held at a distance from us – largely due to genealogical ruptures, and displacement. This piece speaks to our anxieties within racialized diasporic communities around “who has the right?” to culture, and “who is doing ‘culture’ right?”; and reclaims a space for those who, like this character that breaks all the rules, are rendered unrigorous, illegible, and unaccepted.

We ‘character’ize this piece as an intervention on the tension between “nation” and diaspora – a reclamation of our who, what, when, where, why in our self-determination. 

“Audrey 1 (PJÄTTERYD)” and “Audrey 2 (PJÄTTERYD)”

“Audrey 1 (PJÄTTERYD)” and “Audrey 2 (PJÄTTERYD)” are a reclamation of Asian identity and pop art. These portraits depict Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the 1961 film, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. The film has been received as a classic, deemed culturally significant by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. However, it has a character performed in yellowface, Holly’s landlord Mr. Yunioshi, which is played by white actor Mickey Rooney. In the film, Rooney wears make-up prosthetics to make him look like an orientalized caricature of Asian people from WWII propaganda posters. A deviation from the intersectional character from Truman Capote’s novella upon which “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is based, the film version of Mr. Yunioshi is a stereotype. speaks in a barely coherent accent referring to Holly as “Ms. Gorightry”. His sole purpose in the film is to emphasize the white actors as part of the trendy, mainstream social scene of New York City. While he is the landlord of the Upper East Side brownstone in which Holly resides, his apartment is decorated with Japanese decor, portraying his lifestyle as decidedly “other”. 

An overt display of racism in a film so widely celebrated, this illustrates the silent trauma that is specifically endured by the Asian community. Purchased at IKEA for $40 each, I’ve taken these factory-produced celebrity portraits and transformed them into one-of-a-kind works of art. As a young person consuming mainstream white media, I mentally catalogued any Asian person I saw in roles spanning from background characters, supporting players, to the rare starring role. I’ve paid homage to many of them here: Lucy Lui, Jet Li and Sandra Oh to name a few. It should be noted that of these representations, most are straight and all are cis-gendered.