jrvmajesty:

LEX·IC·A - Jerry Blossom & Mister Junior - January 2013

Jerry Blossom & Mister Junior

Kiam Marcelo Junio a.k.a. Jerry Blossom is a familiar face to Salonathon. I first encountered Kiam via a submission to Chicago IRL and soon after experienced a plethora of inventive and vividly sharp performances discussing their Philippine heritage, naval career through the shifting lens of gender and class. Kiam continues debuting new works and series with exponential fervor. Kiam was also just awarded Chance Dances Critical Fierceness Mark Aguhar Memorial Grant. Find out more about Kiam during my recent interview with them: soundcloud.com/joevarisco/kiam-marcelo-junio-interview-a

Mister Junior is one of those forces of life that passes through a social climate and leaves it altered and renewed. Their spirit of collaboration and engagement is in a constant state of forward movement. Recently Mister Junior began an expanded tour around the country jumping in and out of Chicago in time to audition for America’s Got Talent. Details of airdate on their site soon.

LEX·IC·A is a celebration of the ways in which we communicate with one another and the knowledge we share in this process. It seeks to explore the myriad of complex and beautiful ways we share, play, love, suffer and honor one another through performance work and strive to cultivate community. LEX·IC·A is an inclusive event for anyone interested in procuring dialogue and discourse through performance. Take risks, challenge norms, resist and thrive!

Most time I photograph people in their own environments because it is personal, familiar, and comfortable for them. For me as a photographer, the situation becomes rather peculiar, intimate, and doubtful. Once I achieve the trust of the model, I can feel their energy and their desire to be seen and be explored but at the same time still reserve some for themselves. It is in those Almost Naked moments that my subjects are the most exquisite, when things occur, and what generally is not displayed initially in public is exposed. - SHEN WEI in conversation withJOERG COLBERG

SHEN WEI is a Chinese photographer who explores the intimate life of his subject through portraiture, landscape and still life. By intertwining the three genresWEI produces a unique and sensitive perspective of his homeland.

Born and raised in Shanghai, SHEN WEI currently lives and works in New York City. His first monograph titled Chinese Sentiment has been released by Charles Lane Press in New York last year.

Save the date: his new solo exhibition will be on view at Light Work, an artist-run, non-profit photography and digital media center in Syracuse, NY from November 05 to December 14, 2012 (opening: Thursday, November 8, 5-7pm).

via We Find Wildness

Tseng Kwong Chi, photographer, performance artist, Keith Harring’s main photographer.  Born in Hong Kong and lived in Canada and studied in Paris, died of AIDS complications in 1990.

Kwong Chi developed an artistic persona in the late 1970’s as a kind of Chinese Communist dignitary complete with the classic Mao Tse-Tung suite, dark eyeglasses and a tag stamped “SlutforArt” (first user of hashtag, perhaps?)

Many of his photographs are deliberately composed in the heroic Maoist Cultural Revolution style.  His hand is stuck cavalierly in his pocket, and deliberately includes the camera’s cable release in the frame…

The term “Orient” as it refers to Asia was invented in Europe, “the Occident,” as a way to separate “us” vs. “them.”  Asian countries had not considered themselves as any different, or Europe as “there” and not “here.” You can see this reflected in the difference of schools of philosophy coming from these regions.

Even to this day, what constitutes as “foreign” and “exotic” is filtered through a Western-centric lens, always ready to call the East as “other,” what is over there, and not here, what is not yet conquered, but is available to be so. 

Through decades of Western influence throughout the world, this mindset has become perpetuated and is taken as status-quo.  Decades of imperialism and cultural subjugation has convinced most people that Eastern traditions, ways of dress, cultures, are fine to be taken apart, used for one’s own personal expression, simply used as tropes of inspiration, decoration, a way to look “different,” “exotic,” and “unique.”  Western appropriators continue to perpetuate “other”-ing the East.

It’s as if someone were to come to your house (without knocking) and take your furniture, your family heirlooms, your art work, to “borrow” (steal).  In exchange they offer to lend you their DVD’s. Who the fuck wants to borrow DVD’s? In addition, they’ve got shitty taste in movies.

FUCK ORIENTALISM (and not in a good way). 

yummydick:

“From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.”  - Edward Said

NEW Wong Kar-Wai film, The Grandmasters.

I’m not sure what I think yet about Wong Kar-Wai’s new visual style. He’s obviously filming in digital now, and no longer working with Christopher Doyle (cinematographer).  The sumptious, slow-mo, cross-processed, blurry, neon/candy-colored schemes of his earlier films (Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, 2046) is now replaced with fast paced, cold, intricately detailed, sharp visuals.  

People change, after all. Art has to continue evolving. I’m sure this will still be amazing.

Luckily, they’re screening In the Mood for Love and Happy Together at the Siskel Film Center this month. If you’re in Chicago and wanna be my date, let me know!

I find it disturbing when people say “Yes, I’m a racist, and I’m gonna keep being that way.”

This rant, though perhaps well-cited, is full of holes and assumptions based on stereotype, self-loathing, and surrender to the status quo. She also negates the fact that there are Asian-American men who grew up just like her, who want nothing to do with patriarchy and planning for the future. In the end, all she says is that she dates white guys because that’s who has societal power.  She basically wants white privilege by proxy. 

Disgusting.

asiansnotstudying:

This is such bullshit and self-hate. 

It has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with patriarchy. And guess what? More and more “racist”-against-Asian-men Asian women are getting on the white boy bandwagon.

I’m an Asian girl. I don’t date Asian guys. Yep, I’m one of those that date lots and lots of (mostly, but not always) white guys.

Why? It’s simple: I’m a racist.

Yep, I said it.

And guess what? I’m not alone. I’m actually –- shudder to think — part of a trend. Asians are marrying non-Asians at a rate much higher than any other racial group. This summer Pew reported that 37 percent of all recent Asian-American brides wedded a non-Asian groom. In an earlier study of the couples who married in 2008, 9 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics did so with someone of a different race or ethnicity. Thirty-one percent of Asians did.

This trend has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with patriarchy and cultural sexism and a lifestyle I grew up with and want nothing to do with anymore.

It would be easy to say that what I’m looking for culturally doesn’t come in an Asian package.

Wesley Yang wrote about it in New York magazine last year and made my heart beat faster with the recognition of his rage against my cultural heritage machine. “Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility,” he says.

And. Fuck. Yes. To. This.

My mother (born and raised in China) is obsessed with career “steps” and “paths” and working for this magical future that I doubt exists. It’s like New Age self-help for middle-class strivers. She can’t fathom that I’m a freelancer by choice and constantly laments “that economy.”

The physical attributes of my ideal man? If we’re being stereotypical about it, well, I like geeky, scrawny and without muscles. I like effeminate. Also, did I mention that Daniel Liu is fucking HOT?

And if we’re talking about this, plenty of white guys have tiny penises. And I’m sure not all Asian guys have tiny penises. (Though, I’d have to sleep with some to find out for sure.) So really, not a physical thing.

But there’s more than that.

Even if a charming, funny, intellectually curious, in so many words perfect man who has untied himself from the chains of Asian virtues came down my way — even you, Daniel Liu whose hotness is practically a law of physics — I would probably pass.

Partly, it’s because I can date non-Asian dudes. More of me and other “racist”-against-other-Asian-men Asian women live in communities with people of other races. More of us attend those bastions of liberal thought mingling with other young, upwardly mobile types of colleges. More of us are in well-paying jobs, which expose us to people outside our ethnic enclaves.

But it’s also because we still see ourselves as minorities, immigrants, outsiders. And we want the same thing new residents of America have wanted for hundreds of years: To be true Americans. Even among American-born people of Asian descent, only 28 percent describe themselves as “Americans.”

I was born in Beijing to Chinese parents and emigrated to the U.S. when I was three. I don’t have an accent. Aside from my very Midwestern one. My Italian cooking skills are far superior to my Chinese ones. My Spanish is better than my Chinese. My closet is filled with J. Crew and a healthy dash of Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren.

My pale, white-bread boyfriend jokes that I’m one of the whitest people he’s ever met. And that’s probably not by accident.

I date white men because the term “model minority” grosses me out. I date white men because it feels like I’m not ostracizing myself into an Asian ghetto and antiquated ideas of Asian unity. I still see myself as a minority. And with that, pretty soon comes connotations of “outsider.” And I don’t like that.

Dating white men means acceptance into American culture. White culture.

I realize my thinking is fucked up. I get that. But as long as men tell me over dinner, “I’ve always wanted to be with an Asian girl” and then still think they’re getting laid, and as long as during beauty countdowns white girls are called “beauties” and Asian girls are called “exotic beauties” — well, then white will still be the societal standard.

And yes, I am Asian, but I’m drinking the same Kool-Aid as everyone else. Junot Diaz describes it as white supremacy. The idea that white is still tops, SAT scores, corporate jobs and fancy degrees be damned.

In the Boston Review, Diaz says: “And yet here’s the rub: if a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you, doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact, almost guaranteed its survival and reproduction. There’s that old saying: the devil’s greatest trick is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that, if it exists at all, it exists always in other people, never in us.”

So here it is: I am racist. I’d rather not be. I’d much rather be swept up into that beautiful land of racially ambiguous beauties. But for now, I will not and will never date one of my “people.”

Source: (XOJane)

thesearenotdistractions:

Wong Kar Wai
Chungking Express
Opening scene, (1994)