This is my script from a talk I delivered on September 21, 2023 at UC Berkeley as part of a panel titled Intimate Collections: Artists Archiving Sex in the Asian Diaspora organised by Lena Chen and Evan Sakuma.

Intimate Collections presents queer and sex worker archiving practices among Asian diasporic artists. Both contributing to and resisting the archival turn in contemporary art, the physical and digital archives curated by these artists offer new perspectives on questions of race, sex, and labor. How do archives straddle multiple roles as artistic, political, or scholarly projects? What can scholars learn from community-engaged approaches toward archival curation? How does a collection’s meaning and possibilities transform and expand through time and space?

The evening was bookended with performances by Oakland based drag artist Piss E Sissy and my fellow panelists were Kayla Tange and Empress Wu.

1. Obscene / Off-scene

This is an attempt to position seemingly disparate and discrete obscenities across various archives and consider their residual and emergent intimacies. I am building upon Lisa Lowe and Raymond Williams’ definition of the residual, the remains of history and “elements of the past that continue, but are less legible” in the present. They study the residual as a way to gesture towards the emergent, the “incomplete and unfolding,” the latent potential beneath the substrate of society that promises a futurity that is not yet here.

Lisa Lowe refers to intimacies as an intervention into colonial “archives of liberalism” and knowledge production, and insists on looking at what is in the etiolated pages that have been starved of light, left slightly off center, and off scene, relegated to the shadows. For Lowe, the Archive (with a capital A), is one that “subsumes colonial violence within narratives of modern reason and progress” (2) and it is through examining the intimacies, that we are able to engage with “relation across differences rather than equivalence”, and “convergence(s) of asymmetries.” (11) It is these intimacies of obscenity that I am interested in focusing on, as we traverse the transnational journey from being queer in Singapore to being “Gaysian” in Asian-America.

Across both continents, I have had a consistent interest in unpacking “obscenity” in society, or to reference porn studies scholar Linda Williams, what she refers to as “on/scenity”. Williams defines on/scenity as marking “the tension between the speakable and the unspeakable which animates [our] contemporary discourses on sexuality.” (4) For Williams, it is through the study of the boundary between what is seen and suppressed, on and off scene, that we are able to grapple with this “limit of representability.” I place this limit in conversation with the space between the residual and the emergent, and I am interested in what falls off this ledge of representation. Anjali Arondekar writes about sexuality in colonial archives and refers to the paradox of the colonial archive being empty and yet full. It is this paradox that I would like to examine, what Arondekar refers to as the “open secret”, that needs to be suppressed for the archive to maintain structural integrity, “without whose concealment the archive ceases to exist.” (7)

The obscene object of study is one that destabilizes knowledge production and interrupts circulation. It might be interesting to frame my talk today, and this panel as an “obscene object.” Challenging the limits of what an institution can contain, and what we are permitted to give critical attention to.

2. Solos

I begin with a practice in independent filmmaking in Singapore, my home country and a nation with strict media censorship rules. I was challenging the limits of what is publicly visible with regards to gay sexuality. This was in 2007, there was a high-profile parliamentary debate over the repeal section 377A, the section of the Penal Code that was introduced by the British during colonial rule that criminalizes private acts of consensual sex between men as an “unnatural offense.” At the conclusion of the 2007 debates, the government decided to retain Section 377A. It was only until last year (2022) that Section 377A was finally repealed.

That same year in 2007, I performed in and co-directed an independent film that chronicles the twilight of an intergenerational gay relationship. The film consisted of scenes that were considered too graphic for the censorship board and the film was withdrawn from screening at the Singapore International Film Festival. The comment from one of the jury members is that the film was “drawing attention to itself by deliberately crossing perimeters.”

Since that experience, I have found that by exploring the boundaries between what is considered obscene and invisible, in contrast to the visible and on scene, one is able to outline the perimeter of what an institution deems acceptable at a certain point in time. This is a political project that traces the shifting shapes of these open secrets across time through the archives; in order to map out a brief history of queer (in)tolerance.

3. Cane

In 2012, I reenacted a 1994 performance that resulted in the ten-year de-facto ban by the government on performance art in Singapore. Josef Ng, the artist, was charged and found guilty of committing an “obscene act, to wit, by cutting [his] pubic hair and exposing [his] buttocks to the annoyance of the public.” This obscenity law, again, is a legacy of the colonial British penal code that was inherited by the Singaporean government post-independence in 1965.

Part of my research question was to track how censorship laws have evolved in the 17-year gap between the original performance and my reenactment. Instead of re-performing the “obscene” gesture, I reconfigured it by exposing my fully shaven crotch to the audience, and this gesture was approved by the Media Development Authority of Singapore who was in charge of vetting licenses for public performances. This gesture was permitted not because there was an increased tolerance of exhibitions of sexuality, or acceptance of nudity, but because mechanisms for censorship have been calibrated to be more nuanced and precise. This 2012 gesture was scripted (and neutered in its potency), in contrast to the 1993 gesture which was unexpected (and therefore viewed as a political provocation). When Josef first performed the piece, part of his score included the proclamation that cutting hair can be a form of silent protest. My response in altering the performance gesture was to exhibit my complicity in adhering to the conditions of production and question how an act of protest can still happen when there is no hair left to cut?

On top of this, an obdurate drive in the reenactment is to raise awareness around the obfuscated context behind the 1993 performance, one I see as the shadow of the shadow. Josef was performing in protest against police entrapment of gay men in public cruising areas, and how they were publicly shamed in the media, and sentenced to be caned. Over the years, this intention behind the performance was largely forgotten in lieu of the sensationalization of this “obscene” gesture. What remains hidden in the act of making the obscene exceptional is something I have been keen on unpacking.

4. Queer Objects

Being an artist in Singapore means being in a constant dance with this “limit of representability”. In 2015, I assembled a constellation of objects in an art installation titled Queer Objects: An Archive for the Future. The installation was devised in response to an artist residency I did in Melbourne, Australia. As part of my residency, I conducted research at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, a volunteer-run community archive that collects documents and realia from the queer community. I was particularly drawn to the eclectic collection of objects that were held by this archive. This was one such object - can you guess its significance within the archive?

This water was collected from the main pool of a gay sauna in Sydney shortly before it closed down in 2013. It was interesting to note the variety of objects, that ranged from the spectacular to the everyday, that queer identities are associated with and defined by.

After returning to Singapore, I was curious to what objects a queer archive might hypothetically hold in Singapore, where such an institutional infrastructure does not exist. I turned to social media to gather 81 objects from my network of acquaintances and approximately 60 contributors and organizations, asking them to respond to the prompt of what they might see as representative of their queer existence in Singapore. These objects were placed without context or labels on a stepped archival shelving unit. This installation was designed as a temporary archive-on-loan, these borrowed possessions were returned after the exhibition concluded.

A day before the exhibition opening, I was informed that the limit of representability was once again breached by three of the objects on display. I returned to the exhibition space to discover that they have been removed and construed as “obscene” objects because of their potential to be utilized for erotic stimulation. This was a puppy tail butt plug, a penis sheath, and a glass dilator. After much negotiation, two of the objects were eventually replaced by a vinyl shadow cut out of the outline of these objects. The third object, a glass dilator was permitted to be displayed only after I accounted for it as a medical device and the institution’s interpretation of the object’s function was recalibrated, keeping it within the perimeters of the on/scene.

Ironically, in this process of removal and reinstatement, the glass dilator was made twice invisible, first in its removal, and then in its reintroduction, as media and public attention was focused on the two objects that were censored. What was initially classified as a “sex object” was rendered visible because it “passed” as a medical device, and in its transparency, the dilator and its narrative were obfuscated in a different manner, where it was placed off scene and no longer visible. The fungibility of a trans-object/subject is one that is insistently recognised as biological and medical, correctional instead of queer, a prosthetic of pain instead of pleasure.

There was an additional conceptual exercise which was integral to the installation that was subsequently abandoned after this breach of trust, which effectively dulled the critical potential of the installation. In a bid to queer the patriarchal archive. I am reminded of the etymology of the word “archive”, which has its roots in the archon, literally translated as the “house of the father”. I wanted visitors to the installation to contribute their own queer objects over the three-month duration of the exhibition. The eventual hope was to replace all of the original eighty-one objects with a new constellation of queer objects defined beyond my network of affinities. I see the unrealized conceptual exercise as the shadow of the shadow, the penumbra, the liminal potential of the obscene, or casualties in these games of power and control.

5. Penumbra

I am interested in attending to this concept of the penumbra as an agential position. The penumbra (眾罔兩), or the shadow of a shadow, is what Taiwanese feminist Liu Jen-peng proposes when theorizing an abject sexual subject position. This subject position is one that haunts both the dominant subject position and its residual shadow and draws from philosopher Zhuang Zi’s parable of a shadow questioning its own shadow. Chen Kuan-Hsing extends Liu’s formulation of the penumbra as a state of non-being in his epilogue of Asia as Method to consider Han-Chinese racism present in societies where ethnic Chinese populations dominate. Chen considers the relationship between the subject, its shadow, and the penumbra as a model of understanding the “discursive and psychic strategies'' deployed when thinking about the figure of the Other. For Chen, what unifies these strategies is a “hierarchical distinction between human and nonhuman - or, more specifically, an assertion of the power to judge the degree of humanness of others.” (261)

To attend to the penumbra as an agential position is therefore one that interrogates the category of the human and suspend fictions about the integrity of the human body to consider the demonized, feral, inhuman, and dehumanized population that are not legible as “proper” objects of study, beyond the periphery of the obscene.

6. The Puzzle Box

This conversation about humans rendered as objects, or less-than-human, brings us to the final thread of obscenity.

Over the past couple of months, I have been doing embodied research as a mediated sex worker, looking into the representation of Asian masculinity in gay fetish pornography within the North American studio context.  I define mediated sex work as labor that is performed for and through media, the origins of this are phone sex operators and studio pornography. Recently, with post-pandemic precarity and the encroaching expansion of the gig economy, this includes webcam sites, sexting, and fan content sites like Only Fans etc.

The penumbra that I am examining in the shadow that is gay pornography can be parsed into three strands. The first strand is kink and fetish practices, in the form of role-play bondage domination sado-masochistic scenarios that are performed for the camera. The second strand is race, and how it is often recognised in studio pornography as a fetish category. Fetish defined as finding sexual gratification in a specific object or quality, and in this instance, one’s race. Where one is apprehended as Asian before human. In this sense, the first two strands are very much intertwined and refracting off each other, where a person of color is interpellated as a fetish. What ethical position one might adopt when a person of color, who has been historically and politically objectified or seen as less-than-human, decides to participate in the production of kink and fetish pornography? What are the layered and fraught politics of submission within a racialized studio pornography context - performing as a submissive on camera, but also submitting to the racialised infrastructure of porn?

The third strand of this penumbra that I am interested in is the work of pornography itself, the labor that goes into the production and performance. This is what differentiates my research from scholars in porn studies who approach pornography as text from a film studies perspective. Beyond the cinematic document, I am interested in the performance of labor that goes into the production of pornography, or from a Marxist social reproduction perspective, the labor that goes into the sustaining of the labor. This includes care work, maintenance work that supports pornography.

There is a lot more to be said about this recent research, but I will like to conclude here by returning to my semi-autobiographical film in 2007. These intimacies of obscenity that I have shared were threaded through an autobiographical body in movement, but with the belief that this body is singular-plural. A body that is opaque to itself, and one that refuses the fiction of self-sovereignty and transparency. A body connected to other bodies across time, giving the self up to be remade and reconditioned.

The final image of this film was the result of a fraught post-production process and features the boy protagonist returning to his mother, a neat consolidation of threads that is trapped by heteronormative logic and desires.

I would like to invite us to close our eyes and imagine the ending that was scripted, but never shot.

The stillborn, still waiting to be birthed, the penumbra.

We see the boy, naked in a landscape covered with thick fresh soft snow, a stark contrast to the equatorial climate that permeates the film. 

He looks into the camera, and turns slowly away from us.

He walks, and continues walking, until he disappears into the horizon. 

You may open your eyes now. Thank you.

Works Cited

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 2015.

Williams, Linda. “Pornography, porno, porn: thoughts on a weedy field”, Porn Studies, 1:1-2, 24-40, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2013.863662

Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Duke University Press, 2009.

Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Duke University Press, 2010.

Liu, Jen-peng & Ding Naifei. “Reticent poetics, queer politics.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6:1, 30-55, 2005, DOI: 10.1080/1462394042000326897

Other References

Lim, Ryan. “Missing objects, or feeling for companions in unfree terrain.” Asian Film Archive. Sep 12, 2023.

Magro, Aiden. "Exposing the State: L Z's Queer Performance." Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, vol. 5 no. 1, 2021, p. 175-203. Project MUSE, doi.org/10.1353/sen.2021.0007.

L, Z. “Queer Objects: An Archive for the Future.” Queer Asia: Decolonising and Reimagining Sexuality and Gender. Zed Books, 2019.