Artists Whiskey Chow and Charmaine Poh join host Gemma Rolls-Bentley in a conversation on the legacy of home for queer Asian diaspora. We discuss how they developed their transformative works, the history that informs artmaking, and how we create a shared playground and queer homeland with each other, for each other.
Whiskey Chow is a London-based artist, activist and Chinese drag king. Chow’s practice engages with political issues and related topics: from queer(ing) masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, interrogating stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity, to enabling empowerment by queer-reading ancient Chinese myth. Her work is interdisciplinary: performance, moving image, experimental sound, installation, and experimental printmaking. As artist-curator with activism ambitions, Chow launched, curated and performed in ‘Queering Now 酷兒鬧’ since 2020; a curatorial programme amplifying and championing queer Chinese/Asian diaspora voices in the West. Learn more about her practice at https://www.whiskeychow.com/.
Charmaine Poh is an artist working across media and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. Her current focus, THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE, is a series of enactments considering the potentialities of the feminist techno-body. She is based between Berlin and Singapore. She is a co-founder of longform magazine, Jom, and a PhD candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin. Learn more about her practice at https://charmainepoh.com/.
How They Love explores the complexities of performing queer feminine identity in Singapore, see the works here.
you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼 is an imaginative queer masculine body-scape, see the work here.
Referenced at 17:10, kin is a short film by Charmaine Poh that looks at the notion of home, queerness, and belonging.
Referenced at 36:00, in the shadow of the cosmic is a lecture-performance by Charmaine Poh exploring the avatar and techno-orientalism.
Referenced at 34:25, SOFT & HARD: Beyond Recognition and Queer Coding is an exhibition curated by Whiskey Chow
Referenced at 35:10, Queering Now 酷兒鬧 is an artist-led curatorial programme featuring works by 16 Sino queer artists, directed by Whiskey Chow.
A full transcript of the episode is available here.
This podcast series is produced by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Dreaming of Home is on view September 7–January 7, 2024. Learn more about the show at leslielohman.org/exhibitions/dreaming-of-home
Show music: Fantasy Island Obsession by Tom Rasmussen ft. Kai-Isaiah Jamal, with thanks to Globe Town Records.
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