• Political resistance and counter-conduct under constraints
• Queer Asian diasporic sexuality and embodiment
• More-than-human performativity and ecological aesthetics
• Queer archival and material methodologies
• Relational and socially-engaged praxis

Etiolated Conduct: More-than-human Performativity with/in Singapore

If society is a tree, and its fringes are the leaves at the tree’s outermost reaches, then trimming the fringe, where the youngest, tenderest leaves grow nearest to the light, can only stunt the growth of the center. […] what appears at first to be a fringe issue will slowly strike you as being at the root of the very kind of people that we are.

Tan Tarn How, “Far-Reaching Stricture on the Arts.” The Sunday Times (Singapore), 13 Nov. 1994.

A Malayan banyan sapling, cut from the parent tree at The Substation, an independent arts center in Singapore, and confined to a public housing flat, persists in an attenuated state. I take its etiolated condition as both metaphor and metonym for artistic and cultural production in Singapore.

Etiolated Conduct names this persistence as resistance under constraint. The term bridges J. L. Austin’s description of “etiolated” performatives, utterances rendered hollow or void, with the horticultural practice of etiolation, where plants deprived of light are deliberately distended, suspended in calibrated conditions of making-live and not quite letting-die. I read Austin alongside Michel Foucault’s late work on counter-conduct, drawing both through a critique of liberal personhood (Saba Mahmood, Chen Kuan-Hsing, Pheng Cheah).

My objects of study center on artistic praxis from the 1990s onward, a period of rapid liberalization in the decades following independence in 1965. Across them I examine unpragmatic and opaque forms of resistance. The arc of my dissertation begins in the pragmatic and transparent, moves through camouflaged choreographies, and bends toward etiolated conduct.

“More-than-human performativity” engages the more-than-human conversation in performance studies (Rebecca Schneider, Karen River Barad etc.) and bridges it with the performativity latent within more-than-human scholarship (Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway etc.). This pairing allows us to engage with a more-than-human performativity and a performativity of the more-than-human. I begin by extending speech-act theory toward the ecological and infrastructural forces conditioning political life, moving from figure to ground, and conclude with withdrawal and worlding beyond human live-ness.

I build on writers who have engaged the more-than-human with/in Singapore, among them Comaroff and Ong, Marcus Yee, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Joanne Leow, Charmaine Chua, Natasha Myers, and Eng-Beng Lim. Rather than examine the horticultural spectacles one often associates with the city-state, I turn to embodied practices of suspension in a state/State of calibrated livability. My friend Chor See compares this to the penumbral method of 滋阴.

I argue that under etiolated conditions, art’s indirection performs a politicization of aesthetics rather than an aestheticization of politics, gathering force through durational deprivation rather than spectacular confrontation, generating lateral intimacies with pioneer vegetation, carceral architecture, and drainage infrastructure, a sensuous underside that escapes accounting.

If Singapore’s post-natural environment is a glimpse of governance to come, a study of resistance under etiolated conditions carries anticipatory significance for a world where liberal frameworks of visibility, rights, and recognition are already eroding.

From 2012 to 2016 I worked with the artist archive of Ray Langenbach, an educator and performance artist based in Singapore through the 1990s. He documented many performances of that decade, including Josef Ng’s Brother Cane and the Artists’ General Assembly of which it was part, and led me into Langenbach’s practice.

This section gathers three projects that engage with queer archives: a residency in Melbourne, Australia, where I visited the Australian Queer Archives; a temporary archive of queer objects assembled in Singapore, prompted by that visit; and an object relation lecture and workshop that navigates the history of Section 377A in Singapore.

These projects engage with corpuses of knowledge: an artist residency in France, an art museum’s collection of reading materials, and my embodied passion for Lindy Hop, held alongside the memory of Paddy Chew, the first person in Singapore to publicly come out as living with HIV, who staged a monologue about his life in 1999.

This section holds my earliest and my most recent works. Embodiment of Desire tracks seeds planted during my shift from a moving-image practice to performance in Chicago, and my navigation of objectification and desirability as a gay Asian man in the United States. That inquiry continues in current work on racialized objectification and the practice of rope bondage.

An installation responding to Kim Donaldson’s From the Lecture, A Reminder of Life (1996). Kim’s installation documents her father’s experience of caring for her brother who passed away from HIV/AIDS related complications in August 1995.

Twenty years on, I archive and re-present Kim’s installation alongside documentation compiled from my research visits to the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, now renamed as the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA), over my two-month residency.

Lecture, This Way was sited within the residency flat on the VCA campus and opens up my private residency space for public view, highlighting the subject/object relationship and the role of the caregiver for the patient, the artist for the artwork, and caretaker for the archive.

Queer Objects: An Archive for the Future was a response to Lecture, This Way (2015), a project that included the documentation of objects from the Australian Queer Archives. After returning to Singapore, I embarked on a project to assemble objects that would be representative of a hypothetical Singaporean queer archive.

In the months preceding the exhibition opening, I reached out to various members from the queer community. These included artists, theater companies, queer-friendly faith groups, civil society organizations and personal friends. During the collection process, I encouraged the inclusion of objects that each contributor would associate with their journey of queer identification. I eventually shortlisted a selection that showcased a spectrum of queer experiences. This was meant to be not only a hypothetical but also a temporary archive. The objects were on loan and returned to their owners after the conclusion of the exhibition.

Through this exercise, I assembled a collection of 81 objects that vary from items of personal significance to memorabilia from events and organizations. I displayed them on a nine-sectioned archival shelving unit without specific context or attribution. On the day of the exhibition opening, the presenting institute requested for the removal of two of these objects from public display, citing concerns over Section 292 1(a) of the Penal Code.

After negotiation, the two objects were replaced with black vinyl stickers that represented their outline. The exhibition proposal for Queer Objects: An Archive for the Future included an exercise that involved the rotation of new contributions into the display over the duration of the exhibition. After the withdrawal incident, an agreement was reached with the institution to discontinue this exercise.

In 2019 I contributed an article to Queer Asia edited by J. Daniel Luther and Jennifer Ung Loh that reflects on the censorship incident, and considered other objects that were made transparent in this act of hyper-visibility.

50/50 (Singapore) was a series of three dance classes held over three separate weekends, inspired by the experiences my collaborators and I had with the Lindy Hop, a social dance with African-American roots that is traditionally done to 1940s big band jazz music.

Audience members purchased a ticket that allowed them to participate in all three classes. Each class was designed in collaboration with a co-teacher with a different topic of interest, and focused on a specific aspect of the Lindy Hop.

The first class unpacked the assigned roles of “lead” and “follow” in Lindy Hop. Joanna and I had a conversation through and about the dance, sharing their experience on and off the dance floor in relation to their designated respective roles of “lead” and “follow.” They taught the footwork for the eight-count “Lindy Turn,” a fundamental step in the social dance.

The second class centered on “ethnicity” and covered a brief history of the Lindy Hop. The social dance originated in Harlem, New York, among the African-American community. It was revived in the late 1980s by various communities located in the United States, the U.K. and Sweden. Sinclair and I taught basic individual jazz steps and discussed what it means to be ethnic Asians performing this dance of African-American origins.

The third and final class touched on sexuality. Both Jereh and I shared our experiences as openly gay men who were attracted to this heteronormative social dance. Jereh shared autobiographical aspects of his journey as a contemporary dance artist and reenacted sequences from his past performances. Toward the end of the class, Jereh and I conducted an exercise where they attempted to teach the basic six-count partnered footwork of the Lindy Hop without verbal instruction and through physical contact.

I have been doing Lindy Hop for more than a third of my life, and I have known many in the Lindy community for an equal amount of time. Despite the many conversations through social dancing, I rarely meet up with the community beyond the dance floor. 50/50 was an opportunity for me to get to know Joanna, Sinclair and Jereh a little better. It was also a platform for us to share our passion for this dance with a larger audience.

Lindy Hop used to be a huge part of my life. I was part of a Lindy Hop performance company, and we would travel for dance camps and competitions. Whenever I visited a foreign country I would seek out and attend social dance evenings for an immediate connection to the local swing dance scene. Recently, my passion for Lindy Hop has taken a backseat to my artistic practice. Even though it is a lesser part of my life for now, I will realize at times how my experience with this social dance has influenced the way I approach movement and dance.

A number of people have questioned me about the performance format, which took the form of a series of dance classes. Lindy Hop is about a conversation between two people, a call and a response. A class format allowed us to move and physicalize this knowledge, information that we often are more comfortable passively receiving. I understand it is a demanding commitment on the part of the audience, but I wanted to replicate the experience of how I fell in love with this dance, through a series of dance classes very much like this. It was not love at first sight, and Lindy Hop does have a very steep learning curve. It is important for me to create an environment where one can sit with the imparted knowledge over an extended period of time.

Another aspect I hope to investigate with these series of classes is how we approach and disseminate information about movement and dance. A consistent question I have posed to all three collaborators while we were designing these classes is to find an alternative way to teach this dance. We wanted to work with the quality of movement instead of the quantity of information imparted.

This journey has been a challenging experience of self-discovery. All three collaborators serve as a mirror to reflect upon my own thoughts about Lindy Hop. I hope this series of classes will not only trigger your interest in the dance, but would similarly serve as a mirror for you to challenge your own preconceived notions of what, why and how we move.

In the early hours of 1 January 1994, Singaporean artist Josef Ng’s performance of Brother Cane resulted in a public debate over obscenity in performance art and led to a ten-year restriction of the licensing and funding of performance art in Singapore from 1994 to 2004. Josef Ng was charged in a court of law for committing an obscene act and pleaded guilty. He was fined S$1,000.

Cane consisted of six testimonials of Josef Ng’s performance which sought to reconstruct and fragment the memory of the event. These six accounts are namely:

Archiving Cane is an installation and durational performance that consolidates and presents performance remains and documentation from my reenactments of Josef Ng’s work.

The exhibition space includes twelve selected performance remains from various interpretations and reenactments of Josef Ng’s performances. I was present throughout the duration of the exhibition to provide context on the significance and function of each object displayed. Visitors were encouraged to interact with these performance remains.

The exhibition also included a resource library, where documents from my research of peripheral events around Cane were displayed. These included programs, newspaper articles, academic theses, critical writing and license application forms among others. Access was also made available to a Facebook page which details in chronology digital documents and online articles referring to my reenactment and Josef Ng’s performance.

Archiving Cane was given a Restricted (21) rating by the Media Development Authority of Singapore and it was a requirement by the licensing authority to inspect and verify that all visitors were above the age of 21. I decided to choreograph this gesture of inspection into an integral part of the exhibition experience.

All visitors were given an edition folio of critical texts assembled on site and the folio of each edition was personalized with a photocopy of the visitor’s identification card. A copy of each visitor’s identification (with sensitive personal information redacted) was included as part of the display in the gallery space with their consent. Over the duration of the exhibition, this display grew to serve as a record of attendees, transforming this licensing requirement into part of the artwork.

What relationship do we share with our possessions? How can we orient ourselves to these things differently?

This intimate interactive experience for 20 participants each session begins in the form of an artist lecture and dialogue where I share my experiences of staging my installation Queer Objects: An Archive for the Future (2016), an assemblage of objects for a hypothetical queer archive in Singapore.

Following this, the audience-participants join me in a series of participatory activities and conversation, to examine the fictional and factual, virtual and actual potential of objects, in a bid to meditate on the contingency of identity and being.

Curator and artist Jason Wee invited me to contribute a video work for an informal exhibition at Proud Spaces, Singapore. I assembled some documentation and footage from the development process of Catamite with actor and director Irfan Kasban, specifically around the impossibility of translation and understanding historical figures through the colonial archives. The form of this video is inspired by Kim Ye’s video work.

This exhibition is an extension of my research into Josef Ng’s Brother Cane, with a focus on the week-long interdisciplinary art event that hosted Brother Cane. The Artists’ General Assembly took place from 26 December 1993 (Sunday) to 1 January 1994 (Saturday) at 5th Passage Contemporary Art Space in Parkway Parade Shopping Centre, Marine Parade, Singapore.

Artists’ General Assembly: The Langenbach Archive contains a selection of approximately 150 documents from performance artist and academic Ray Langenbach’s visual and text based archive of the arts scene in Southeast Asia from the late 1980s to the present. The exhibition also includes approximately eight hours of video documentation on five television monitors from the original event captured by Ray Langenbach.

Langenbach moved to Singapore from Malaysia in 1993 and taught at the National Institute of Education until 1996. He completed his PhD thesis in 2004 titled Performing the Singapore State: 1988–1995, which details the controversy surrounding Artists’ General Assembly.

The installation/archive evolved over the duration of the exhibition as I altered and re-threaded connections between documents. Viewers were invited to participate by leaving corrections, comments or opinions about the archive on post-it notes and adding them to the installation with critical consideration. These notes were collected, documented and archived after the deinstallation of the exhibition.

On 24 January 1994, National Institute of Education lecturer Ray Langenbach received an anonymous letter in his mailbox that called for the removal of Performance Art from the Visual Art syllabus, and a boycott of classes featuring this “forbidden art.”

This letter followed the National Arts Council’s (NAC) statement on the restriction of the licensing and funding of performance art in Singapore on 22 January 1994. NAC’s statement was in turn triggered by media reports of two performances at the Artists’ General Assembly, one of which was Josef Ng’s Brother Cane.

Education & Emancipation is the second phase of a two-year research project that delves into the periphery events surrounding the Artists’ General Assembly. The focus for this phase is on the gesture of proscribing politically-charged art in 1994 and an attempt to measure its impact on arts education since then.

The three main questions the exhibition proposes are as follows:

Using Jacques Rancière’s 1981 text The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation as a critical foundation, the exhibition includes a durational performance in which I manifest an unconventional teaching method proposed by Joseph Jacotot in 1818.

Rancière not only proposes that one can teach something that one does not know, but most importantly that only through not knowing what one is to teach can true intellectual emancipation occur in both the educator and his charges.

I interpreted the teaching methodology by attempting to learn French throughout the exhibition via the comparative analysis of both the English and French text of The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The blackboard served as a record of my progress.

During the exhibition run, I invited a group of current National Institute of Education, Singapore students who were training to become art teachers to the exhibition space for a dialogue session and discussion.

A whiteboard in the exhibition recorded the trainee teachers’ response to the exhibition. Other documents displayed in this text-based exhibition included surveys conducted with arts educators on their pedagogical ethos and the teaching of art with a social, political and cultural reference, an anonymous interview with a present Ministry of Education art educator on her opinion of the state of art education, an interview with Ray Langenbach on his memory of the incident, along with the Teacher’s Creed and Teacher’s Pledge by the Ministry of Education, Singapore.

Who am I? Am I my name? My Body? My Sex? My History? What State do I represent? Should I believe in the State? Perhaps I am propaganda for a State that does not yet exist. Or perhaps I am here to expropriate what can never be mine. Perhaps I should return to my home. Where is that? Where my father’s ashes were released, swallowed by the fish he fed every day? I ate that fish.

You are a performance artist. It is the 24th of January 1994. You teach contemporary art at a public university. One day, you receive an anonymous letter from your students. The letter calls for a boycott of your classes.

You are LGB.* LGB is Lan Gen Bah. You were born in 1948. You are a Marxist. A scientist. An ideologue. A member of the government. A citizen of the State. You are Song Liling. You are Cheng Dieyi. You are Ray Langenbach. You are Loo Zihan. You are Lee Mun Wai. You are Shawn Chua Ming Ren. You are Bani Haykal. You are State power. An individual. An ISA (Ideological State Apparatus). A KPI (Key Performance Indicator). You are LGB, without the T. You are a meme. Propaganda. You are not yours alone; you are an idea demanding its own acceptance.

*LGB refers to Lan Gen Bah, Ray Langenbach’s 1990s performance persona. Staged before current debates on trans-exclusion, it critiques the institutionalization of sexuality and the psychological and social effects of competitive education.

In 1999, The Necessary Stage presented Completely With/Out Character, a docu-theater monologue devised by Paddy Chew, in collaboration with playwright Haresh Sharma and director Alvin Tan. The monologue was a candid account of Paddy’s experiences as the first individual to come out as a person living with HIV in Singapore.

With/Out is an interpretation of Paddy’s monologue, which I conceptualized. It was first presented in 2015. The 2017 version presents a reimagining of this monologue, and examines its relationship to the written and video documents. I worked with a social media team to create an online archive of news articles and interviews with and regarding Paddy on a Facebook page that accompanied the production.

In May 1999, The Necessary Stage worked with Paddy Chew to stage a monologue titled Completely With/Out Character at the Drama Centre on Fort Canning Hill. The docu-theater piece records his experience as the first person in Singapore to come out publicly with his HIV-positive status. Paddy passed on in August 1999 a few months after the production’s conclusion.

In 2015, AIDS is no longer perceived as a terminal disease; HIV-positive individuals can lead a relatively normal and healthy life with the aid of advances in medication. In part, this is due to the roads paved by individuals and researchers who came before us, individuals like Paddy, who defied convention and conservatism to tell his story at a time when there was still much ignorance and prejudice surrounding AIDS.

With/Out is an interpretation of Paddy’s monologue. Through the use of multi-media, video documentation and other archival material, I reconstructed the production as an extension of my research into performance reenactments, the mediation of a “live” presence via the use of technology, and the revisioning of queer histories in Singapore.

The performance space was divided into two areas – a black box that is sited above a white cube. In the black box the audience encounters a three-screen synced video projection of various archival documents that span the length of the 1999 production documentation.

In the white cube, a reader performs a transcript of the text in cadence with the production video documentation. Each evening features a different reader and the performance is streamed “live” online for a virtual audience, an archive of the webcast is available here.

Of Public Interest was a project that moved 4,500 volumes from the Singapore Art Museum’s resource room into the space of a gallery.

The Singapore Art Museum Resource Room is a collection of catalogs, brochures and books that the institution has amassed since its inception in 1996. A number of these materials were acquired specifically for the resource room, but most of them were gifted to the institution by individuals and partner organizations. This resource room was open for access as a reference library until 2008, when the museum’s administrative offices moved out of the main building into a neighboring complex.

For my President’s Young Talents commission, I decided to reopen this body of information for public access over the duration of the exhibition. Together with a team of 25 volunteers, these books were catalogued and sequenced chronologically according to their date of publication. They have also been color-coded according to the location of the publisher and presenting institution.

Presented as a relational installation-in-flux, the work functioned as a reference library open to the public. The public was invited to shape the collection for the duration of the exhibition from August 2015 to March 2016, subject to the following conditions:

• Each visitor was allowed to withdraw one book from the collection.
  Public access to this book was restricted for the duration of the exhibition.
  These books were shrink-wrapped and placed in a separate area of the installation.
• Each visitor was allowed to loan one book to the collection.
  This contribution was in effect for the duration of the exhibition.
  These books were accessible to other visitors and placed in a separate area of the installation.

At the end of the exhibition, there were a total of 14 public contributions and 84 public withdrawals. These interventions, along with a form that lists their name, gender and the reason for their withdrawal / contribution of the title are archived below. The withdrawn books were reinstated to the Resource Room, and contributions were returned to their respective lenders.

I wanted to foreground the evolving priorities and concerns that were reflected in the institution’s collection of books and ephemera, and for the space to critically reflect on the role of the art museum as a center for the dissemination and transmission of knowledge.

Endnote: I served as editor for the exhibition catalog, which gathered text from the residency alongside fragments and quotations from catalogs produced since the residency’s inception. During the residency, I visited and documented each of the prior FRAC des Pays de la Loire residency locations, including the Abbaye de Fontevraud, La Garenne Lemot in Clisson, and Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire.

Åbäke designed the catalog. Its dimensions and page count were derived from the average of the twenty-one existing catalogs from prior residencies, and the table of dimensions is reproduced inside. The names of all 263 participants over the 29 years of the residency program ran across the top of each page, extending the archival research performed in the space.

An archive of early performance work on the embodiment of desire and labor, made as an MFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I grappled with my own desirability and tested what performance could do without restriction or censorship.

This body of work is dedicated to my graduate advisors the late Barbara DeGenevieve and Shellie Fleming.

In January 2010, I performed as a dancer from 16 to 23 January 2010 at a gay bar in New York City that featured Asian go-go performers (The Web). I collected 306 American one-dollar bills over those six days. These notes and my experience led to a yearlong project titled Annuit Coeptis: He who approves of our undertakings.

*Annuit Cœptis: annuo (nod, approve) and cœpta (beginnings, undertakings).

Made in response to a 2007 parliamentary speech against the repeal of anti-sodomy laws in Singapore, this presentation of Annuit Cœptis juxtaposed the speech with a go-go dancing performance and ritual acts that referenced Brother Cane, a performance piece by Singaporean artist Josef Ng. Text from the parliamentary speech was inscribed across 306 American Dollar bills in ultra-violet ink.

A 16mm projector projecting film loops measuring 169 cm in length projects extreme close-ups of an American dollar bill above a square podium. The 6 hour durational performance involves me transforming the installation space through my engagement with various materials, which includes a rope, boxing wraps, shaver, a ceramic jar etc.

Six panels of dollar bills earned over six nights of working as a go-go dancer were exhibited in the studio space, accompanied by a performance I staged at the window.

A camera was placed across the road and directed toward the window of the studio space. The footage was projected “live” onto an empty wall in the studio, giving visitors two simultaneous views of the performance, from the interior and the exterior of the building.

The project culminated into a final performance installation. As part of this presentation, I disseminated these bills to 306 friends, family and acquaintances across the globe. Six frames were displayed as part of the installation, alongside a single-channel video. Each individual frame contains bills earned on each corresponding day of my labor and performance in New York City.

Over the duration of the exhibition, I systematically removed the bills and extracted the “Eye of Providence” on the reverse side of the bill, preparing them to be mailed along with an accompanying letter on the one-year anniversary of their receipt from 16 to 23 January 2011.

At the conclusion of the exhibition, these letters were mailed out to their respective recipients.

Dispensary features six 8” by 8” canvases, each accumulating a bodily trace over a two-week period. The date and time of every deposit was recorded in ultraviolet ink, legible only under blacklight.

At the center of the installation was a blank 3’ by 3’ canvas. Before the opening I sent invitations to sixty male-identifying friends, asking them to contribute to this surface over the run of the exhibition. Thirteen consented to participation. Each made an appointment and completed a form documenting what they visualize for pleasure, their desires, along with their most recent sexual encounter. Drawing on those responses, I composed a private one-on-one performance for each participant, after which they were given private time and space to complete their contribution to the work.

Tender Exchange is a collaborative installation composed of work by five artists pursuing degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 28 April to 2 May 2011, each artist contributed their own work while also responding to, working around and collaborating with the other participating artists to produce a material and conceptual experience that extends beyond the independent practices of each participant.

Legal Tender is a performance on the third day of the installation. I distributed a series of limited edition artwork to members of the public over the duration of my performance. These multiples consist of bills and coins earned in part by artist Molly Shea, whose installation preceded Legal Tender.

Members of the public dial a designated number that connects them to me inside the exhibition booth, where I deliver a first-person account of labor in a nightlife economy and a shared moment of companionship and intimacy. Callers who remain on the line for the full duration are eligible to collect a multiple.

I managed to distribute 52 of 98 multiples over the duration of the performance, unclaimed multiples were handed over to artist Jennifer Mills, whose installation followed Legal Tender.

How do artists navigate the tricky entanglement of desire, intimate labor, and capital through embodied practice? What happens when our imaginations of Asian American relational practices expand beyond gestures of care, sustenance, and provision to include wounding, withholding, and overpowering? This performance intervenes in the form of a conference panel to unpack racialized queer and economic relations. Through agonism and antagonism, we explore visceral abstraction as practice, strategy, and method. We share our praxis through performance documentation, live demonstration, and ritual actions to unpack our relationship to orientalism, objectification, and queer-class solidarity.

Anne Cheng’s theory of the Yellow Woman reveals a “peri-humanity” where “personhood is animated through, rather than eviscerated by, aesthetic congealment.” As artists and practitioners of kink and fetish, we live within this animation, thinking through Sianne Ngai’s “visceral abstraction” alongside embodied labor. Ngai’s catachresis of “congealment” demonstrates the material, synthetic effects of social abstractions, letting us linger on the viscerality of the value-form, examining how bodies, desires, and intimate labor intersect beyond liberal frameworks of subjectivity.

Our conversation engages multiple perspectives: Lena’s work as artist, mother, academic, and former sex worker, Riven’s art as a trans-diasporic multi-disciplinary artist, my experience as an academic, performer, and bondage educator, and Empress Wu’s practice as pro-domme and performance artist.

We examine how bodyworkers capitalize on (and are capitalized by) ornamentalism, a body both adorned and undone by blood’s viscosity. We argue that this relational understanding of thingliness enables us to glimpse forms of queer-class intimacies. If capital enters the world, as Marx writes, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” then our visceral methodology engages this sanguine reality through blood’s contradictions: simultaneously internal and abject, intimate and violent. How has blood been made to work? How do we make blood work?

A selection of films I made between 2005 and 2012. They are best read in sequence: each film responds to the last, and the body of work maps my thinking over time.

Please note that the films contain mature content.

The films traveled to Pusan International Film Festival, where Solos screened in competition, and to the AFI Festival (Los Angeles), NewFest (New York), Frameline (San Francisco), the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and the 23rd Turin GLBT Film Festival, where Solos received the Nuovo Sguardi Award.

I was twenty-four when I made Solos, conceived as an avant-garde and deliberately difficult film. Part of me wanted to test the boundary, my own, my fellow performers’, the State’s, and the audience’s. What I was less prepared for was how quickly the film became a vehicle for other people’s agendas, commercial and moral, and how, abroad, it was received through a frame that read Singapore as repressed and the work as a representation of gay life in an illiberal state. Being legible on those terms was the condition of representation.

That double bind between visibility and capture is where the seed of etiolated conduct was planted.

书籍是储藏智慧的不灭明灯**These vessels of knowledge are eternal beacons, keeping wisdom’s flame alight.

This quotation appears in my dissertation, in dedication to my parents. My father first encountered it in a message a friend left for him. It captures his hope for what education can do, and the potential of books as vessels of knowledge.

I come from a family of educators. Both of my parents, as well as several relatives, have been lifelong secondary school teachers. Their dedication to education made it possible for me to become the first person in my immediate family to pursue a PhD, and their approach to teaching continues to shape my own.

Teaching has also been integral to my performance practice, taking the form of lectures, pedagogical exercises, and experiments. Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster was an early reference and continues to inform my teaching philosophy. As an educator, my task is to equip students with the ability to discover what I do not know. This is especially important in a world that is increasingly shaped by generative AI. After Rancière’s Jacotot, the challenge as educators at this conjuncture is less about knowing the “right” answers than teaching our students to imagine the cost of asking the "wrong" questions. To return to performance theory, these are hyper-felicitous performative utterances that possess far-reaching societal consequences and set off a chain of causality we may never fully comprehend.

• Performance praxis and theory
• Moving-image production and critique
• Film theory and art criticism
• Art history and theory with a focus on the contemporary
• Post-dramatic dramaturgies and multimedia design
• Time-based media aesthetics across disciplines
• Transnational queer theory

I have taught since 2010, across fifteen years, two education systems, and every level from a specialist arts high school offering the International Baccalaureate to a 200-level graduate seminar.

My teaching began in Singapore. I conducted tutorials in film studies at Nanyang Technological University and in digital media and the moving image at the National Institute of Education, and taught foundation-year time-based media at NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media. At The School of the Arts I designed and taught the art theory syllabus and supervised graduating projects. At Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts I taught media arts and later returned as an external examiner for the Fine Art diploma program. At LASALLE College of the Arts I supervised BFA dissertations in the Theatre and Performance department.

As a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010–11, I coordinated visiting artists for Gregg Bordowitz’s Theory into Practice graduate seminar, hosting Glenn Ligon, Paul Chan, and Andrea Fraser, and assisted on production courses in moving image and directing for camera. I also assisted on the Abandoned Practices summer school run by Lin Hixson, Matthew Goulish, and Mark Jeffrey, formerly of the Goat Island collective. In 2023, I returned to its final edition as a visiting scholar, marking the cycle from student to teaching assistant to instructor.

At UC Berkeley from 2019 to 2026, I designed and taught three reading and composition courses, each built around a research question in performance and materiality. I served as graduate student instructor for Dance in American Cultures and Video Art, and co-drafted the syllabus for a graduate seminar in Ecological Aesthetics with Shannon Jackson and Juniper Harrower. In 2025 I received the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award from UC Berkeley’s GSI Teaching and Resource Center.

Loo Zihan is a Singaporean artist and performance studies scholar based in Brooklyn, New York. His research examines the etiolated conduct of unpragmatic resistance within restrictive conditions. These etiolated counter-conducts rely on transgenerational transference and more-than-human sensitivities to persist differently. His praxis emphasizes the malleability of memory and archives through performance reenactments, pedagogical workshops, and essay films. Zihan received the Young Artist Award from Singapore’s National Arts Council and holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.