May 20, 2022
As a TCK(Third Culture Kids) Asian queer woman performance artist who grew up in a maternal family, I have my mother’s last name. In my early experiences, I worked as a journalist, interviewing Chinese civilians about their daily life. After, I enrolled in a mediaand international relations major in the United States. Later, I explored alone through 17 cities in the United States, Mexico, and China. At the same time, I began to conduct an in-depth questioning of the medical structure and system of mental illness in China and the United States. In 2018, I enrolled Fine Arts Major and Gender Studies Minor at The New School, Parsons School of Design in New York.
In February of 2020, I was forced by the NYPD to delete my artworks. Because I insisted on the spoken and academic freedom of my art, the NYPD took me to a psychiatric hospital having a mental examination on me. After experiencing the compulsory, I continue to create first-person art personas to inform living as an Asian feminist in the pandemic political environment. I am re-telling the Chinese queer language through the maternalism of my family’s archive, oral history, and footage in a 10-year film project, Absent: X’s Death.
Furthermore, in the painting Absent: self-Portrait series oil painting, observing my own naked body, and paying attention to physical feelings of violence, are the conduit for me to express my feelings. My painting practice has transformed what felt unstable into feeling supported by caring for myself, which I did not learn in my childhood because of the presence of rigid invisible individualism.
My goal is to represent women’s identities through retelling gender structures and queer languages in the Chinese language matrix through fluid gender personas and academic writing. I, as an artist, is experimental abjection; as Hedy, is a human.
Resource: https://amt.parsons.edu/finearts/2022bfathesis/hedy-zhang/