Shipwreck
over an Erection
In his writing back in the 90s, Looking for My Penis, Canadian filmmaker Richard Fung examines the problematic representation of East Asian men in western gay porn, in which the white men are always penetrative, whereas East Asians and anus are conflated. More than two decades later, Fung’s observation still applies and is exemplified in the visual campaign, which I appropriated in this work, from a western gay porn production specializing in an interracial category called Daddy for Asian. As a strategy to hijack the racist image and subvert it with new narrative, I cut out the functionless penis of the East Asian man and rebuilt a new one for him with parts from disassembled rice cookers, which relate closely to the East Asian identity. The new penis intends to serve as a narrative space for a rewriting of the story between Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Transplanted to a homosexual and erotic context, the rewriting confronts the power hierarchy in gay porn, naturalized as and in disguise of intimacy under the umbrella of love and pleasure, and challenges the division of domination and submission, physically in sex and metaphorically in power.
In his writing back in the 90s, Looking for My Penis, Canadian filmmaker Richard Fung examines the problematic representation of East Asian men in western gay porn, in which the white men are always penetrative, whereas East Asians and anus are conflated. More than two decades later, Fung’s observation still applies and is exemplified in the visual campaign, which I appropriated in this work, from a western gay porn production specializing in an interracial category called Daddy for Asian. As a strategy to hijack the racist image and subvert it with new narrative, I cut out the functionless penis of the East Asian man and rebuilt a new one for him with parts from disassembled rice cookers, which relate closely to the East Asian identity. The new penis intends to serve as a narrative space for a rewriting of the story between Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Transplanted to a homosexual and erotic context, the rewriting confronts the power hierarchy in gay porn, naturalized as and in disguise of intimacy under the umbrella of love and pleasure, and challenges the division of domination and submission, physically in sex and metaphorically in power.
