Lena Chen

This project examines contemporary Asian American artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City, who utilize performances of race and gender to reject respectability politics and complicity with carceral, capitalist, and patriarchal notions of national belonging. Employing autoethnography, archival research, oral history, and performance and visual analysis, the project explores the altar-making practices of Red Canary Song, a collective of Asian migrant massage and sex workers; the “Asian female gaze” pioneered by performance and video artists; and race play (racialized roleplay) by professional dominatrixes and their white, male clients. Against the backdrop of surging anti-Asian violence and a history of immigration exclusion, how might performances of abjection and carnality open up liberatory possibilities foreclosed by the figure of the model minority? Following a lineage of socially engaged art and feminist performance, how do these performances uniquely intervene in the emerging field of Asian American art?