Photo Gallery

Exhibition dates 展覽日期：13.5-30.6.2019

Bad, the disobedient, the non-conforming, the challenging, the transgressive – not substandard, not of poor quality.

A gold-clad spirit desecrates a lotus pond with beer. A ‘Pondan’ Muslim revels in a genderless neverland. Eyelashes poke teary eyeballs. Trans-housewives concoct hormone cocktails. Older men cruise in the open sea. Counterfeit Snow Whites perform princess rituals. However disparate in form, geography, race and ethnicity, gender, and age, these works – by Ip Wai Lung, Samak Kosem, Isaac Chong Wai, Mary Maggic, Rob Crosse, and Eisa Jocson – respectively iterate on their own terms how bodies can be bad.

Being good means acting the same perfect way — but there are so many ways to be bad. Creativity and genius can be bad. Fluidity and queerness can be bad. Enjoyment and exuberance can be bad. For Father and Mother, even autonomy and independence can be bad.

Society normalizes our bodies to make sure we are good. We’d rather take flight in being bad. Just as the mechanisms of life have evolved by hacking our genetics with bad copies, we will use our bad bodies to hack the hegemonic systems of patriarchy, hetero-, and homo-normativity.

Let’s have a grand cocktail party! A banquet, even. Viagra for the aging gentlemen, open-source estrogen for the ovulating ladies! As one of trans-housewives likes to say, we human beings have been biohacking bodies since our beginnings, making cheese from cow tits, beer from yeast farts, wine from grape poop. Against the Apollonianism of gender hierarchy and rigid Aristotellian categorisation, we summon the amorphous Dionysian in every one of us, ever moving and dancing, becoming and dissolving, flickering and shifting, turning and heaving, churning and loving. 

The Dionysian queering of bodies operates in tandem with the queering of language, and herein lies the destabilisation of the meaning, and indeed the very existence of the good-bad binary. In a call to arms in the seminal feminist text The Laugh of Medusa (1975), Hélène Cixous proposes that to write as a woman is to voler, that is “to fly” or “to steal.” For its literal and allegorical portrayal of stealing, fleeing, risking, and questing, recall also Jean Genet’s Un journal du voleur (A Thief’s Journal, 1949), the moving semi-autobiography of the writer’s earlier life as a vagabond, criminal, prostitute, and homosexual. In our equally thieving act, we whore our bodies to steal back the word “bad”. Bad is no longer the antithesis of good, nor does it remain a subjective qualifier, masquerading as stable universal truths.

We don’t like to admit it, but even our queer bodies are under the constant pressure of surveillance, examination and normalization. As Maggie Nelson lucidly observes in The Argonauts, “homonormativity is a natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality”[1]. As most western democracies began the decriminalization of gay sex in the last century, and the subsequent legitimization of gay marriage in the recent decades, neo-liberal mainstream mass culture has successfully appropriated gay agendas into their canon, their genres, and their expressions and memes, in service of capitalistic spectacles and pharmacopornographic consumption. Now, “western queer phenomenon no longer represents or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way.”[2] As such, in Asia, younger democracies have become the new frontier of queer activism, where truly transgressive underground energy can be unleashed against the religious-fundamentalist, neo-Confucian-filial, authoritarian-legalist-patriarchal state apparatus. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The more forcefully you restrict our bad bodies, the more fiercely we unleash our biopolitical potential. Beware bad bodies, ours and your own.

 【About Nick Yu】
Nick Yu (b. 1990, Hong Kong) works at Blindspot Gallery, a Hong Kong-based art gallery that began with a primary focus on contemporary photography and lens-based media. “Bad Bodies” is his debut independent curatorial project. Previously, he was a curatorial and research fellow at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. He contributes regularly to Art Asia Pacific. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in the History of Art and a BSc in Economics from the Wharton School.
 

「壞」 可以是反叛、不順從、挑戰權威、越界，但絕並非指低人一等或劣質。

一個鍍金的靈體以啤酒褻瀆荷花池；一名易服穆斯林在無性別之分的夢幻樂園裡狂歡；一隻用眼睫毛刺探彼此的眼球；兩名跨性別家庭主婦調製荷爾蒙雞尾酒；一眾年老男人在汪洋大海中的郵輪之旅；兩個冒牌白雪公主表演公主的儀式。縱使涵蓋不同形式、地域、種族、族群、性別、年齡，藝術家葉惠龍、Samak Kosem、莊偉、Mary Maggic、Rob Crosse及Eisa Jocson的作品卻不約而同演繹軀體可以怎樣「壞」。

「好」是重覆完美，然而「壞」卻形形色色。創意和才華是壞的，流動與酷兒是壞的，享樂和歡愉是壞的。 對父親和母親來說，就連獨立與自治也可以是壞事。

社會規範我們的身體來確保我等的「好」，但我們卻寧願奮起使壞。正如不良基因偶爾會侵入遺傳系統而帶來物種進化，我們也會用壞透的身體入侵高舉父權、所謂「正統」的異性或同性戀的霸權社會。

就讓我們來辦一場盛大的雞尾酒會，甚至是盛筵！給上了年紀的男士，來點偉哥；給排卵期中的女士，來點DIY雌激素。正如跨性別主婦Maria所說，人類很早就開始「生化改造」軀體：從牛的乳房變出芝士、用酵母的屁來造啤酒、用提子的大便來釀紅酒。為了對抗形式主義的性別階級觀念和亞里士多德主義分類法，是時候召喚我們心中的酒神，盡情舞動，解除束縛，隨心變化，恣意奔放，慾望四濺。

要以酒神精神使軀體酷兒化，語言酷兒化是第一步，意味顛覆固有意義，推翻好與壞的二元對立。愛蓮・西蘇（Hélène Cixous）在其女性主義名篇《梅杜沙的微笑》中，提出以女性身分寫作就是在voler，意即「飛行」或「竊取」。尚・惹內（Jean Genet）在他動人的半自體小說《竊賊日記》中，記述他身為流浪者、罪犯、男妓和同性戀者的生活。我們也用同樣的盜竊行為，出賣軀體偷回「壞」這個字眼。「壞」不再是「好」的反義詞，也不再偽裝成恆久不變的普世標準，為主觀感受下定義。

雖然我們不想承認，但我們的酷兒身軀持續受到監視和審視，迫使我們要「正常化」。瑪姫・尼爾遜（Maggie Nelson）在《阿爾戈英雄》中清晰地指出：「同性戀合法化後，同志正常化是自然的結果。」[1] 隨著大部分西方民主體系在上世紀開始同性性行為去罪化、同性婚姻在近數十年獲法律承認，同性戀議題成功打入新自由主義的主流大眾文化，融入其正典（canon）、流派（genres）、措詞（expressions）和迷因（memes），實為服務資本主義和連結色情和藥理的消費行為（pharmacopornographic consumption）。由於現在「西方的酷兒現象不再代表叛逆、次文化、地下和邊緣，也不再以上述種種方式呈現」[2] ，因此亞洲和其他新興民主體系便成為酷兒運動的新戰線，讓具顛覆性的地下力量得以釋放，對抗集宗教原教旨主義、宋明理學、孝道、專制、父權於一身的國家機器。每股作用力必然伴隨反作用力，我們的壞軀體越受到限制，就會更越猛烈地釋放我們的生命政治潛力。小心你我的壞軀體。

[1] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 73

[2] Ibid., 73

【關於俞迪祈】
俞迪祈（1990年生於香港）現任職於刺點畫廊，一間建基於香港的當代藝術畫廊，以當代攝影及影像主導的創作為重點。《壞軀體》為俞迪祈首個獨立策展項目。他曾於費城的Slought Foundation參與策展及研究的工作。他的評論文章常見於Art Asia Pacific。他於賓夕凡尼亞大學取得藝術史文學士及於沃頓商學院取得經濟學理學士。