Peeking into a desire: Exhibition unveils hidden worlds

The Age

2 days ago

Tenderness and camaraderie are difficult to find these days. Conflict and prejudice predominate, directed especially at those whose sheer existence seems unacceptable to certain regimes. Rights and protections hard-won through decades of collective action have been overturned at a single stroke of a permanent marker, institutional obligations and responsibilities ignored, and critical voices silenced. As in the not-so-distant past, many of those voices are now forced to speak in code, creating subcultures of mutual recognition and support to avoid censorship and persecution.
Tender Comrade, a thematically tight yet conceptually rich display of recent Chinese works at White Rabbit Gallery until November 16, is a timely invitation to enter some of these cultures and communities. The fine line between identification and voyeurism is an underlying theme across the exhibition's four floors, positioning the visitor alternately as tourist, confidante, or something in between. Images of hidden or unspoken desires, masquerade and performance, coded messages and conscious artifice recur throughout, both in the works and in the nested composition of the display itself.
The show is billed as an insight into LGBTQ communities in China but primarily foregrounds gay and transgender identities. This is clear immediately on entering the ground-floor space, dominated by a larger-than-life pair of inflatable legs, anatomically complete to the smallest detail. A low opening cut into the partition at the entrance gives the option to brush past this detail, though most visitors instead ducked discreetly under a raised knee.
The legs are one component of several mixed-media works by Xia Han that draw attention to the gender fluidity inherent in fantasy role-playing games. These are paired with Shang Liang's Boxing Man No. 4 and No. 7, specimens of inflated hypermasculinity that make skilful use of their oil medium to suggest a visceral, pulsating fleshiness.
Moving to the first floor, a series of video works are projected on screens that resemble the ornamented reverse of ancient bronze mirrors in a passage-like space. Conflicting soundtracks bleed together, with the high-pitched tones of Jiū Society's satirical rendering of a viral North Korean hit Jiu Bobo demanding attention. This and other works by Jiū Society member Fang Di, ink painter Liu Yi, documentary filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong, Wang Haiyang, and Magdalen Wong cover a range of subjects but are united by a focus on fluid metamorphosis.
Zheng Bo's lingering meditations on 'ecoqueer' desire in Pteridophilia 3 and 4 are given a wall of their own in the next space, facing a series of vivid landscapes in acrylics on canvas by Zhu Zi. The probing branches and coral-like growths of the latter take on phallic connotations when paired with Zheng's sexualised ferns, writhing and pulsing to a soundtrack of quickened breath and rustling leaves in an unearthly paradise of unrestrained pleasures. In Daoist mythology, such realms are the retreat of the Immortals – humans who have ascended beyond the limits of the mundane.
References to the past continue in the next section, where dividing curtains and the brightly coloured face paint in Sin Wai Kin's paired videos The Breaking Story and It's Always You echo the mannered artifice of Peking Opera. Between these, the inclusion of Lin Zhipeng's candid photographs of nude young men smoking and posing in an ambiguous space enclosed by red drapes introduces a suggestion of voyeuristic scrutiny. Similar themes resurface in the coded homoeroticism of Wang Jun-Jieh's Passion, a sultry narrative of delayed gratification punctuated by telescoping lenses and spurting guns against an explicitly phallic pier.
These subtle allusions to the classical past are the clearest statement of another key objective of Tender Comrade, which seeks not only to represent contemporary LGBTQ communities but to reveal hidden or erased moments of queerness throughout Chinese history. The display can be read as a 'queering' of the canon of Chinese art history, rejecting a conventional focus on large-scale and overtly political works in favour of a subtler and more transgressive artistic vocabulary. Most of the artists included are relatively young or not yet as well-known as their more established peers, either conspicuously absent or unobtrusively set to one side. Works by Ren Hang and Pixy Liao, for example, two of the biggest names, are tactfully displayed on the first-floor landings.