Relation de Voyage: Whiskey Chow: you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼

8 - 31 December 2024

Whiskey Chow

you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼 (2021)

Single-channel digital video

8 mins 24 secs

Edition of 5 + 2AP

 

Screening 8-31 December 2024

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  • Relation de Voyage

    Whiskey Chow: you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼
    Showcasing an imaginative queer masculine body-scape, where the spices used in Chinese cooking grow as spectacular natural landscapes. This work is a hybrid of filmed performance, CGI animation and sound art. It draws on Chinese myth and a sense of belonging from an Asian queer diasporic perspective. you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼 is a meeting point of transgressive queer desire, a dream homeland and reality. We are what we eat, we are what we remember, we are what we believe.
     
    Credit: Director/ Lead Artist/ Performance/ Writer: Whiskey Chow Director of Photography: Ning Zhou Digital Director: Gene Chen Sound Design: Carina Qiu Editor: Ning Zhou with Whiskey Chow Make-up Artist: Olly Yip Producer: Ruth Holdsworth Commissioned by: Queering Now 酷兒鬧 and Kakilang (fka. Chinese Arts Now) Supported by: Arts Council England
     
    Previously exhibited:
    Dreaming of Home, Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York, US (2023)
    MANIFESTATIONS, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton, UK (2023)
    V&A Friday Late: The Body Beautiful, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2023)
    On Queer Ground, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK (2022)
    EXiS Film and Video Festival, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2021)
    Queering Now 酷兒鬧 Dreamality, Online (2021)
     
    Publications: 
    Whitehot Magazine, A queer homecoming at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, Emma Cieslik (2023)
    TimeOut, An exhibit celebrating queer domesticity is coming to Soho, Mellsa Kraveltz Hoeffner (2023)
    Apple Podcast, Finding home accross distances: Whiskey Chow and Charmaine Poh, Gemma Rolls-Bentley (2023)

  • Beyond the body by Yi Ting Lee

    In response to 'you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼' by Whiskey Chow

     “Body art is […] a set of performative practices that, through intersubjective engagement, instantiate the dislocation or decentering of the Cartesian subject of modernism. This dislocation is, I believe, the most profound transformation constitutive of what we call postmodernism”. ¹

     

    In a tender and sensual voyage through and across the body-scape, Whiskey Chow circles back to a land where the queer, diaspora and marginalised are accepted, protected and nourished. Adopting a hyper-masculine muscle suit “as material to embody and explore queer fantasies across both physical and digital worlds”, Whiskey stakes claim on the creation myth of Pangu 盤古, whose body became the world.² The body we traverse is not necessitated on biological terms, rather, it is an ambiguous entanglement of flesh and mind, predicated on both consumption and determination. Years on from the publication of Amelia Jones' Body Art, the body continues to function as grounds for dismantling the Cartesian dualism – a site of subversion malleable to real and digital modification.

     

    The artist defends this haven with a piercing gaze and the evocation of Nezha 哪吒, the deity of protection. In Whiskey’s queer reading of this Chinese folklore, one can find a sense of belonging and the motivation to live on with their chosen family, just as Nezha was brought back to life by their teacher who created their body using lotus roots.³ The cyclical element of the film refers to resurrection as a metaphor for the tireless transformation of identity and body-hood. “顧盼” in the Chinese title signifies a wandering of the mind and a longing from looking simultaneously towards the past and future. By refusing Meng Po’s 孟婆 soup, which, according to Chinese mythology, is meant to erase the memories of souls to be reborn, Whiskey rejects a linear relationship with the past and retains her heritage in a new life. The body can encompass all at once your past and future, the visceral and intellectual, feminine and masculine, material and metaphysical.

     

    Yi Ting Lee is an art writer and researcher based in London. She is also Editorial Assistant and Partnerships Executive at Burlington Contemporary.

     

    ¹ Amelia Jones, “Introduction”, in Body Art / Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp.1–18, at p.1.

    ²  Whiskey Chow, in conversation with the present author (27th November 2024).

    ³  Ibid.

     
  • Whiskey Chow
    Portrait of Whiskey Chow by Yiquing Chen

    Whiskey Chow

    Whiskey Chow (b.1989) is a London-based artist, activist and Chinese drag king. Chow’s practice engages with political issues and related topics: from queer(ing) masculinity, problematising the nation-state across geographic boundaries, interrogating stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity, to enabling empowerment by queer-reading ancient Chinese myth. Her work is interdisciplinary: performance, moving image, experimental sound, installation, and experimental printmaking.
     
    Chow’s curatorial and pedagogical practice also both feed into her “artivist” ambition. The word “artivist” means making art with a heart of activism, continuously negotiating with systematic inequality and making space for marginalised minorities. As artist-curator, Chow launched, curated and performed in ‘Queering Now 酷兒鬧’ 2020; a curatorial programme amplifying and championing queer Chinese/Asian diaspora voices in the West. Trained in Performance and graduated from the Royal College of Art, Chow has also been teaching there as an Associate Lecturer since 2019.
     
    Chow’s involvement in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China in her early 20s (‘For Vaginas’ Sake 將陰道獨白到底 (2013)’ - original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues; curated the first Chinese LGBTQ music festival ‘Lover Comrades Concert 愛人同志音樂會 (2013)’ in Guangzhou) has deeply shaped her creative approach: informed by her queer migrant identity and art-activism; it is intersectional, diasporic, and offers a non-Western perspective within a western context.
     
    Chow performed/ showcased works across the UK and internationally including Yorkshire Sculpture Park, V&A, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Leslie-Lohman Museum and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul).
     
    Recent exhibitions include: Phoenix Chow; Before Phoenix, Soft & Hard: Beyond Recognition and Queer Coding, The Art House, Wakefield (2024); you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼, Dreaming of Home, Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York; Before Phoenix, Queer and Now, Tate Britain; you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼, V&A Friday Late: The Body Beautiful, Victoria and Albert Museum; Look Like Myself Enough? Centre for British Photography, London (2023); you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼, On Queer Ground, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2022); Queering Now 酷兒鬧 2021: Dreamality (online); EXiS Film and Video Festival, Seoul (2021); Do You Hear The People Dream?, Wysing Polyphonic Festival, Online; The Moon is Warmer than the Sun, Queering Now 酷兒鬧, Rich Mix, London (2020); Unhomeliness, Tate Modern, London; Whiskey the Conqueror, Queer and Now, Tate Britain, London (2018); Purely Beautiful New Era (ft. Haocheng Wu), Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Great Conversation, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2017).