“The main message […] is: the political is personal. This as opposed to the feminist statement from years ago that the personal is political. I know it has been said that it goes both ways, but we have to turn it around. We have to think like that.”
—Tori Amos, interview with Paul Tingen
Categorically speaking, I am among one of the less represented groups in the historical Asian American (or, at least, Chinese American) narrative: as a child of Mandarin-speaking, northern Chinese immigrants living on the East Coast, I do not easily fit in with the more paradigmatic figure of the child of Cantonese-speaking, southern Chinese immigrants on the West Coast. Furthermore, as a homosexual Asian male, I have been left out of the pages of the Asian American movement of the 1960s, which has actively reimagined the “Asian American” in strongly heteronormative, masculine terms, as exemplified in the writings of Frank Chin. As such, I am constantly negotiating my own lived experience with those recorded in mainstream Asian American texts.
As an artist, I explore this complex interplay between personal and political, the private and public, social consciousness and lived experiences; I appropriate iconic imagery and stereotypical representations, particularly of Asians (though not limited thereto), to challenge established prejudices that essentialize and categorize diverse groups of people. Specifically, since the social construction of race is inherently tied to the physical body (defined by the color of the skin, the shape of the eyes, the texture of the hair, etc.), I often make references to the body as a site of social inscription, taking cues from artists like Nikki S. Lee and Patty Chang, whose artwork centers around the body. I am also inspired by the work of fashion designers like Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garçons), who creates garments that hide the body and yet make explicit references to it through unusual, stuffed lumps that resemble cancerous growths or internal organs, and Vivienne Tam, whose constant reinvention of and fascination with the cheongsam I read as a study in the racialization of garment. The very idea of a “national costume” (e.g. the hanfu and cheongsam in China, the kimono in Japan, the baro’t saya and barong tagalog in the Philippines, the hanbok in Korea, and so on) speaks to the extent to which garment becomes a defining element of race and ethnicity.
Formally, I am interested in pursuing the potential of clothing as artwork; I believe the practice of dress is the most concise, poignant, and universal experience that really ties the private body with the public. Being both of and foreign to the body, dress becomes the medium through which we allow others to read us. Ultimately, garment is an integral element of representation, both of the self and of the other, in that differences in dress stand in for differences in race, class, gender, and sexuality. I use garment as a canvas on which I can print or embroider text, yet I feel that it can be more intimate than a painting or drawing, etc., because it is more closely tied to the body; it can suggest the presence or absence of the body.
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All images and text (c) Eric Zhang, unless otherwise noted.
