Becoming Monstrous: Embodied Reenactment as a Decolonial Queer Feminist Methodology of Archival Intervention
This practice-led research develops ‘becoming monstrous’ as a decolonial queer feminist methodology of embodied knowledge production within contemporary art practice. It repositions artists’ moving image and the archive as postcolonial sites of encounter and surfaces of transformation through which ‘becoming monstrous’ is enacted, rather than understanding moving image primarily as a medium of visual representation or the archive as a site of institutional preservation. Through embodied encounter, the project proposes an alternative mode of knowing in which the monstrous is a position, not a creature or fixed identity, and knowledge is generated through touch, proximity, embodied spectatorship, and continual transpositions between body and archive, self and other, viewer and image/object, and past and present.
Taking Painted Skin (画皮) from Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异, 1766) by Pu Songling as its point of departure, the research examines the ‘monstrous feminine’ (Creed, 2007) across Eastern and Western mythologies to investigate how bodies, skin, and boundaries become sites through which dominant epistemologies construct, regulate, and exclude forms of difference. Through encounters with the Liaozhai Zhiyi manuscript at the Austrian National Library and the collections of the Freud Museum in London and Vienna, the project employs reenactment, embodied reading, writing, and the production of a ‘failed copy’ of the manuscript to demonstrate how knowledge emerges through the embodied, material, relational, and processual forms generated through artistic practice, rather than institutional forms of knowledge produced through systems of representation, classification, collection, preservation and digitisation.
Presented through the film Becoming Monstrous (2026), alongside expanded painting, sculpture, and art writing, I argue for ‘becoming monstrous’ as a decolonial queer feminist methodology that reactivates marginal archives and generates embodied forms of knowing beyond patriarchal colonial epistemologies.