Becoming Monstrous: Queer Feminist Reimagination of Bodies, Spaces and Practices
Engaging with 1970s feminism, transgender studies, and a contemporary queer southeast Asian postcolonial lens, this project explores the body and its (contact) surfaces, the gaze, the screen, myths, the archive and domesticity, through examination of the manuscript of Liaozhai zhiyi (1766) at the Austrian National Library (Vienna) and the archives of the Freud Museum (London, Vienna) as source, surface, and postcolonial site. Through on-site visit and digital engagement with the archive, close reading and writing, and live performances within and beyond the institutional setting — “the container of archives”, this research positions myself as a visitor, fan scholar, speculative image reader and maker. Moving between personal and institutional lenses, the project draws on self-reconfiguration/reflection through reworking films and texts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Laura Mulvey, Chantal Akerman and Yi Sang. This practice engages in “becoming monstrous” as a form of parody that disrupts the binaries of illusory/real, interior/exterior, before/after, deception/astonishment, as a force that disturbs identity, system, order, and the patriarchal colonial epistemologies of sex, gender, and sexuality.
By integrating methods such as performance, moving image, installation, painting, and writing, the project provides a queer and feminist re-enactment of Liaozhai zhiyi’s mythical world — a Confucian fictional realm where forces manifest as women, non-human entities and spirits, seducing and killing through metamorphosis. Within a postcolonial framework, it interrogates the hierarchies, surveillance and gatekeeping mechanisms of the archive while reanimating the collection of supernatural tales through embodied practice. By tracing the “bug bites” on the manuscript pages, both physically and digitally, the film Becoming Monstrous (2025-2026) performs an institutional re-enactment of the archive, uncovering its layered histories of contact, translation, and inhabitation. The project explores how surfaces and touch become sites of contact and resistance to the socially predefined “bodily truth”, and how bodily sensations and desires are spatially constructed, and how they inform the film edits, sounds, voice, and gestures of cutting, piercing, and binding across multiple materials.