Zadie Xa

Inescapable internet + screen dependency in Daata Editions’ ‘A Goth Life’ looping screening at Art Cologne, Apr 26 – 29

24 April 2017

Film Cologne curated by Daata Editions presents ‘A Goth Life’ at Art Cologne, opening April 26 to the 29.

The film selection “narrates a composite tale of our joyously soulless, insular, tension and angst-ridden times” and includes work by Larry Achiampong, Keren Cytter, Casey Jane Ellison, Ed Fornieles, Yung Jake, Rachel Maclean, Jillian Mayer, Takeshi Murata, Hannah Perry, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Jacolby Satterwhite and Zadie Xa.

Now in its 51st year, Art Cologne 2017 will mark a new collaboration with video, sound and web-based art platform Daata Editions. Played on a loop throughout the duration of the fair, the selected films all touch on the “inescapable internet and screen dependency” of our times.

Visit the Art Cologne webpage for more details.**

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Ebony G Patterson, Thomas J Price, Zadie Xa + the formation of the ‘self’ at Hales Gallery, Mar 30 – May 6

29 March 2017

Ebony G Patterson, Thomas J Price + Zadie Xa are presenting a joint exhibition at London’s Hales Gallery, opening March 30 and running to May 6.

The three artists come together to explore questions of cultural identity within an ‘increasingly international’ climate that is also rife with ‘fear of others’ and responds to the notion of belonging. Looking at the intersection of gender, race, class and nationality, the formation of ‘self’ is put into question and the relationship between perception and identity formation is pulled apart.

Working across a diverse range of media including sculpture, video, textiles and photography, each artist shares a similar engagement with material and process and “amalgamate different social and cultural references, fashions and art historical traditions to create new layered, hybrid mythologies that express the multi-faceted nature of identity in the 21st century.”

Price and Xa will also be in conversation at the gallery on April 22 to discuss their practices.

See the Hales website for details.**

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Mental health in the spotlight with PS/Y’s ‘Hysterical X’ + Hysteria 2017

16 December 2016

PS/Y‘s upcoming Hysteria programme is putting mental health in the spotlight. The multidisciplinary arts festival, that will take place across venues in London throughout 2017, is putting together a number of events dedicated to the research and exploration of psychological trauma and its effects on physical well-being. 

Directed by artist and mental health campaigner Errol Francis and curator Mette Kjærgaard Præst, the programme is the latest in a trajectory of projects dedicated to mental health and arts,   following the previous Anxiety 2014, Acting Out Nottingham 2015and Anxious Xmas 2013 + 2012.  

What role does health and illness play in contemporary society? How can interdisciplinary projects help interrogate contemporary ideas around the psyche? How can we break down the separated boundaries between fields of knowledge? The curatorial and public engagement organization is tapping into the growing need for cross-industry dialogue, with the intersection of arts and health sciences at its core.

As a prelude to the coming events, PS/Y presents ‘Hysterical X at London’s Cafe Oto on December 17. The evening will feature performances by London-based artists Zadie Xa and Visionist.

Xa, whose work explores desire and identity, will bring together video, sound and storytelling in ‘Basic Instructions B4 Leaving’The narrative, written by Taylor Le Melle, is a non-linear venture into a shifting cosmos. Visionist will present “a personal portrait of anxiety” that makes up the new material in his debut album Safe

With a strong focus on interdisciplinary dialogue, the festival will continue across workshops, exhibitions, live performance, dance, music, film, panel discussions, as well as residencies and community engagement, and aims to combine “arts audiences, artists, scholars, scientists and students with interests across the arts, humanities and medical sciences.”

This year’s programme will focus on hysteria as it relates to conversion disorder, paying particular attention to “issues of gender, race and cultural identity.” Conversion disorder is defined as a type of blindness or paralysis that cannot be diagnosed medically. 

Præst recently gave a talk at Camden Arts Centre (November 2016) to discuss some of the research behind the chosen focus of Hysteria, looking at its varied iterations through time; the wandering womb in ancient Egypt and Greece, Witches and “the glowing skin of Princess Diana” were among the many topics covered. 

The project feels refreshing in its investment to not only pose new questions, but seek answers and solutions to the under-discussed and over-looked aspects of psychology as it relates to “post-traumatic stress disorder, psychogenic and psychosomatic disorders” and its effect on physicality. With an investment in opening up dialogue, the festival seems to sit somewhere between the need for further complexity within the Western model of medicine, and a desire for more coherence in our artistic conversations around mental health and healing.

Stay tuned for the upcoming four commissions between artists and biomedical partners that will explore the phenomenon and conceptualization of this topic.**

Hysterical X will be on at London’s Cafe Oto on December 8, 2016.

Header image: Jenna Bliss, Into this Recovery Center (2015). Courtesy the artist, South London Gallery + PS/Y’s Acting Out Nottingham.

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Zadie Xa @ Serpentine Galleries reviewed

30 August 2016

Zadie Xa’s new performance piece Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration reaches my ears well before I’ve entered Serpentine Galleries in London’s Hyde Park on August 13. Lying in the sun waiting for a friend, a drumbeat starts up, slow and steady. A voice next, a foreign tongue begins a roll call, a call met by a response from the other performers. Maybe it’s the sunny Saturday in the city but there’s a festival atmosphere developing, the peak of Bjarke Ingel’s pavilion in the Serpentine grounds appears; like a big top from old country fairs, drawing in the crowd to the sound, ready for the show.

Entering the gallery courtyard for the 5pm performance (one of three during the afternoon) a tension, between this sense of ritual/festival and the nodes of global contemporary art becomes more glaring. The pavilion is not a big top, but contains all the hallmarks of grand, starchitect-affected design. And as the crowd begins to hush for the now familiar roll call of the performers, the whirring of the espresso machine continues unabated. It is this tension, and the audience’s positioning within it, that Xa plays with in this performance —how are we implicated or being implicated?

Zadie Xa, 'Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration'. Performance view. Photo by Manuela Barczewski. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London.
Zadie Xa, ‘Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration’. Performance view. Photo by Manuela Barczewski. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London.

The crowd is met by five performers wearing colourful, stonewash clothes, carrying instruments with haunting masks covering their faces with exaggerated expressions. They march through the audience, which parts, to take up their starting positions. The costume and performance are characteristics of talchum, a Korean form of folk entertainment which literally translates to ‘mask dance’. The ritual element of the performance is striking —there is not only call-and-response, but also faux-fighting, interaction with the audience and dance to the rise and fall of drum beats. There is also a circularity to the movement which suggests the creation of a space, whether physical or ritual. Over twenty minutes the action moves around the entire pavilion. The herd follows and the performers stop regularly to continue the ritual, finishing with the unfurling and then cutting of a long material scroll, made from the same fabric as the performers costumes.

Xa’s work is known for addressing themes of representation, and particularly racialized construction of identity. The particularities of the talchum undoubtedly raises questions over stereotyping of Korean culture, particularly when juxtaposed with the surroundings of a major UK art institution. Yet the masks seem to encapsulate a broader visual metaphor for the current moment. The audience follows the performers, phones at the ready for a new round in the circulation of images. These images will be shared on platforms in which we construct much of our public-facing identity.

Zadie Xa, 'Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration'. Performance view. Photo by Manuela Barczewski. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London.
Zadie Xa, ‘Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration’. Performance view. Photo by Manuela Barczewski. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London.

Yet, the talchum also contains elements of critique of the ruling classes. The dance tells the stories of the common people, the social strictures they face, becoming a place where the behaviour of monks and the powerful is satirised. The line between seriousness and satire is less clear in Xa’s work, perhaps deliberately so. The ritual of Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration feels anachronistic, both familiar and alien, caught somewhere between the language of tradition and trips to the moon.**

Ed’s note, Sep 3: The original published text referred to talchum as a specifically North Korean mask dance but it is, in fact, one shared by many Korean Provinces. See here for more info. 

Zadie Xa’s Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration performance was on at London’s Serpentine Galleries on August 13, 2016.

Header image: Zadie Xa, ‘Linguistic Legacies and Lunar Exploration’. Performance view. Photo by Manuela Barczewski. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London.

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A Rose is without a ‘why’… @ Carl Freedman Gallery, Jul 16 – Aug 19

15 July 2016

The A Rose is without a ‘why’. It blooms because it blooms group exhibition is on at London’s Carl Freedman Gallery, opening July 19 and running to August 19.

There is little information on the themes of the show except that it’s curated by Sean Steadman, and features work by the London-based artist himself, as well as Marcela Florido, Kira Freije, Gabriel Hartley, Sebastian Jefford, Benito Mayor Vallejo, and Zadie Xa.

Steadman, meanwhile, had his first solo exhibition at London’s Project Native Informant in late 2015 with a title that shares a similarly existential sentiment —The Earth is the Earth Because it is Nothing Other Than the Earth. He has also took part in a recent iteration of Marcelle Joseph Projects’ At Home Salon earlier this year in which fellow A Rose is without a ‘why’… exhibitor Xa also showed.

See the Carl Freedman Gallery website for more details.**

A Rose is without a ‘why’. It blooms because it blooms @ Carl Freedman Gallery

Zadie Xa, ‘le déjeuner sur le kimchi (3 Yin Yangs and 1 Moore)’ (2015). Oil and spray paint on jute. Courtesy the artist.
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At Home Salon @ Marcelle Joseph Projects, May 14 – Jul 9

16 May 2016

Marcelle Joseph Projects will host an exhibition, At Home Salon: Double Acts at the curator’s home in Ascot, opening May 14 and running July 19.

The At Home Salon will feature the work of 14 artists, in pairs, across each of the seven rooms of Joseph’s house, which have each been organised by a different London-based curator or gallerist. It is the third edition of a larger project subtitled Double Acts —the first being Material Girls and their Muses again featuring pairs of work by Jesse Darling and Andrea Crespo, for example.

Artists featured in At Home Salon are: Rebecca Ackroyd and Alex ClarkeCornelia Baltes and Will Sheridan JrBea Bonafini and Lindsay Lawson, who aqnb interviewed last year, Emma Hart and  France-Lise McGurn, Gabriel Hartley and Ann Hirsch, Sarah Maple and Zadie Xa, Andrew Mealor and Alex Rathbone.

Some of the curators involved are Arcadia Missa director, Rózsa Farkas and Leopold Thun, co-founder of Emalin.

The show invites speculation around why practices are put together, influence, legacy and continuation, and what —other than aesthetics —can be at the core of a partnership, collaboration or presentation in general. Perhaps there also lies in the show’s questions the shadow of a network that is not horizontal but one that filters down in more specific shapes.

See the FB event page for more details and events info.**

Lindsay Lawson, ‘The Smiling Rock’ (currently in production) feature film., Ccourtesy the artist and Gillmeier Rech, Berlin.
Lindsay Lawson, still from ‘The Smiling Rock’ (2015) feature film. Courtesy the artist and Gillmeier Rech, Berlin.

 

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‘Being Yellow’ by Binghao Wong

28 October 2015

1. An Apologist’s Disclaimer

(“Interests: Orientals, the Far East, GAM4GWM ONLY, What does your name mean? ☺, I speak Chinese/Japanese/Korean too!, *inserts slew of Chinese/Japanese/Korean symbols*, Your English is so good!, looking for cute n young friends, I bet you’re really good at Math haha, All Chinese people are ____, You look exactly like my friend, prefer Asians, no Asians pls”)

The initial approach I took when writing this essay was to be confrontational and didactic in articulating the revolutionary demands of yellow or East-Asian people. I felt it was imperative to organize the voices of others like myself into a methodological manifesto of sorts, partly to echo the efforts of other communities of colour, and partly to recoup the lack of other East-Asian bodies in my immediate surroundings and the art ecologies I was participating in. However, a nagging feeling that I was doing “something wrong”, or being unnecessarily antagonistic, consistently delayed my writing. Sentences and sentiments that I once backed so strongly suddenly became belaboured, diffident. Why was I, on some level of consciousness, employing negotiation as self-censorship when I knew and felt the urgency of my cause? Why did I feel the need to add lengthy disclaimers to every slightly agitating remark made, when I knew I was articulating the realities of structural supremacy and disparity that were far from personalized anathema? Was it because of the defensive comments I had received in the past, not only from white people, but also surprisingly from people of colour? Why do we flinch when we confront our own objectification and dehumanization? What does that then say about the degrees to which we are complicit in the larger scheme of systemic oppression (because we all benefit, to some extent, from standing on the backs of others like us)?

Zadie Xa, 'Diamond Mami with the Slanted Eyes' (2014). Detail. Courtesy the artist.
Zadie Xa, ‘Diamond Mami with the Slanted Eyes’ (2014). Detail. Courtesy the artist.

It is now part of popular discourse that protesting yellowfacing and acknowledging structural privilege are necessary initial steps towards effecting revolutionary change. It should also be apparent, I hope, that we are not ‘post-’ anything, and that imperialism and neo-colonization pervade every aspect of our lives as people of colour, from securitized national borders to institutions of education and cultural work, and even the privacy of our desires. But perhaps these critiques have been sterilized, nipped in the bud. Maybe it has become fashionable to simply reference an institutionalized politics without actually practicing it or taking direct action. Do we consequently internalize the apathy and strictures that keep us in place? Why else would talk of reparations or separatist spaces make us feel uncomfortable? Moreover, who is allowed access to the tools and resources to make these critiques, and who isn’t? Can we as people of colour, and especially a silenced, fetishized yellow people, tell our own stories? More importantly, when do our stories and representations become worthy of being told and seen? By reformulating the tone of this essay into one primarily of inquiry, rather than iniquity, I also hope to broach two intertwined agendas. Firstly, to question why an angry, vocal, yellow/coloured body is still being demonized (by both Other and Self), and secondly, why we feel the need to justify the injustices leveled against us, and what that says about how much further we have to go in our decolonial efforts.

2. Irreducible, Incendiary

To be yellow is to be denied our right to dissent. Activist struggles for yellow power have been aligned with those of brown and black people. Yet, while brown and black anger is demonized and neutralized at any cost, yellow anger is unnatural and non-threatening. We are expected to nod and comply like “model minorities”, not protest the status quo or let our voices be heard. What does that then say about the differences between white and yellow exceptionalism? Do the social ‘privileges’ thrust upon us by imperialist historicizations come at the cost of other people of colour? Our purchased silence implies that our struggles are over, a thing of the past. Is it possible to be yellow and powerful? Why are we not granted the privilege of complexity? If our bodies are being indelibly represented as ineffectual and submissive, how then do we articulate our demands and intricacies on our own terms, without seeking stamps of approval or legitimacy from the very hegemonic registers that circumscribe us?

Teejay H., 'Angry Hotel' (2014). Video still. Courtesy the artist.
Teejay H., ‘Angry Hotel’ (2014). Video still. Courtesy the artist.

In ‘Angry Hotel’ (2014), a video by artist Teejay H., two LGBTQ activists thrash globalized white supremacy while expressing the difficulties of being queer and Korean, such as compulsory military service and enforced Euro-American educational standards. While much of what they say resonates with a decolonial imperative, the cantankerous duo’s aggressive gestures and inebriated Korean profanities often threaten to derail topical discussions. Through a highly unnatural assimilation process, people of colour are expected to tamely organize our pent-up frustrations and generational traumas, for fear of being persecuted as terrorists or radicals. Although rage might potentially mar the coherence of activism, it is also surprisingly productive, not simply because it is opposed to subordination, but because its affective volatility aligns with that of yellow complexities. The pair rightfully argues that their intersectional, localized specificities are often ignored or misinterpreted by institutionalized Western queer discourse. Therefore, their unbridled, inarticulate aggressions become a paradoxically apt medium through which the unknowability of yellow particularities can be channeled and vocalized, without surrendering any more knowledge for neo-colonial co-optation. The duo’s incoherence and untranslatability thus become productive strategies of simultaneous evasion and enunciation, within the equally transient space of their hotel room. Although rarely represented, militarized yellow queerness can relish its temporary airtime as a new-fangled stratagem for articulating revolutionary differences.

To be yellow is to be less-than. On popular television programs, East-Asian men are often infantilized and emasculated, regardless of their proclaimed heterosexuality. They are not permitted the longevity of character development or romantic arcs, and are usually positioned as one-off punch lines, the butts of racist, homophobic jokes. Yellow masculinity is never-man-enough. But at the root of these staged, hyperbolic performances of queer effeminacy is a deep-seated misogyny, a fearful devaluation of all things constru(ct)ed as ‘feminine’, which is then noxiously conflated with racist typecasting. Yellow bodies bear the brunt of intersecting axes of homophobia, misogyny, and racism. Yet, only our subjugation is layered, while our depth and complexity are flattened in favour of superficial trendiness. If yellow masculinities are marginalized and invalidated by white heteronormative patriarchy, how else can we work towards power without debasing other femme-nisms? How can we move beyond the simple bifurcation of submissive effeminacy and phallic machismo?

Yuki Kobayashi, 'Maria' (2015). Performance. Courtesy the artist.
Yuki Kobayashi, ‘Maria’ (2015). Performance. Courtesy the artist.

Artist Yuki Kobayashi performs the contradictions and pluralities of yellow queerness by blending drag and sissy performance with ingrained tropes of virility. In ‘Maria’ (2015), Kobayashi channels his former professional experience as a tennis coach by mimicking the renowned sports star Maria Sharapova. Skirted, he works out with cable weights, physically exhausting himself throughout the durational performance. His muscles tense, perspiration forms, his breathing becomes increasingly labored. In some iterations of the performance, Kobayashi even falls to the ground, completely spent. The representation of an athletic yellow body, one already absent from popular imaginary, is further compounded by Kobayashi’s playful embrace of femme power and drag. He thwarts homonormative desires for masculinity by disidentifying with(in) its toxic regime, engaging instead with a performance of gender power that spans an undecidable spectrum.

III. Origin Story (Myths)

How do we re-value yellow femme expressions when to identify as yellow and femme-nine is to have your femme-ninity denied? Caught in an erotic-exotic bind, East-Asian femmes are expected to be everything and nothing at once. They are expected to encapsulate all manner of fetishistic stereotypes, to be at once infantilized, seductive and hypersexualized, as evidenced in the hackneyed tropes of the guileless geisha or the busty, anime schoolgirl. She has to be innocently intriguing, conservative yet provocative, conventional and futuristic. Unsurprisingly, only the fetishist-patriarch is allowed to travel through time and conjure other worlds of desire, while femmes themselves are emptied of agency to serve as receptacles of fantasy eroticism. Does a yellow femme’s beauty still belong to her? Does identifying or adopting these characteristics implicate yellow femmes in their own objectification? Why do we always have to move away from our indigeneity and localities toward ‘Western’ signifiers and geographies to be read as cosmopolitan, contemporary, or anti-imperialist? Who then occupies or owns the markers of our culture?

Zadie Xa, 'Diamond Mami with the Slanted Eyes' (2014). Courtesy the artist.
Zadie Xa, ‘Diamond Mami with the Slanted Eyes’ (2014). Courtesy the artist.

Artist Zadie Xa treads the fine line between possession and obsession in her carefully crafted tableaux. She deliberately employs oversaturated, almost caricatured, Orientalist aesthetics through forms such as fortune cookies, nail art, straw hats, and take-out boxes to question the Occident’s intrusive preoccupation with proving the legitimacy and purity of the Orient. ‘Where are you really from? Is this authentic Chinese food?’ Yet, the narrative of truth being written is a bastardized, simplified fiction, far from the realities of yellow complexity. In the aftermath, can we still re-occupy these conquered symbols? Did they ever truly belong to us? Xa’s assemblages, such as ‘One Nine 8 3, Tales from a Kasual Cosmic Korean Cypher (Pleasure Island)’ (2015) and ‘Diamond Mami with the Slanted Eyes’ (2014), therefore become testy sites to confront the frustrations of yellow identification. When we decide to use these contested symbols that have been created for or taken from us, does that make us self-reflexive or self-orientalizing? Who labels us ‘Asian’ and what does it mean when it is they or we who use it? By rehashing these overwrought images of yellowness, Xa forces us (both white and of colour) to question the origins of our ignominy and the shallowness of knee-jerk activism.

IV. *Hopeful* Coloured Person

Who is allowed to be conceptual? Can yellowness, in its infinite iterations, be recognized for its beauty, plurality, and agency? In our utopia, it will be possible to be an angry, athletic sissy, to reclaim power without succumbing to patriarchy, as Teejay and Kobayashi’s works attest to. From our imaginations, revolutionary beauty can spring forth. Xa’s installations, functioning almost as blueprints for yellow fantasy realms, often discretely incorporate small clay figurines made in the image of fellow East-Asian womxn. Through an admittedly pleasurable, sensual, and tactile process, Xa proactively moulds a world where its yellow inhabitants become the naturalized, canonic standards of excellence and desire.

Demolish the scarcity model. These hoards are real. **

Binghao Wong curates and writes about intersectional queer life and its representations. Recent curatorial projects include WE ARE LOSING INERTIA (2014) and Asymmetric Grief (2015).

Header image: Teejay H., ‘Angry Hotel’ (2014). Video still. Courtesy the artist. 

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