Bad Asians 3.0, Dirty Looks July 28th, Stonewall Inn

Tuesday, July 28 | 8PM
Bad Asians 3.0
Stonewall Inn | 53 Christopher St.

Curatored by Leeroy Kun Young Kang

ManChyna, Chinese Up Them Eyes Like Beyonce, digital video, Canada, 2014
Lu Yang, Uterus Man, digital video, 11:19min., Shanghai, China, 2013
Alison S. M. Kobayashi, Dan Carter, video, 15min., Canada, 2006
Tanwarin Sukkhapisit, I’m Fine, video, 3:20min., Thailand, 2008
Yozmit, Sound of New Pussy, digital video, US, 2012
Yvette Choy, Part-Time Lover, video, 5min., US, 2010
A second program of Bad Asians. This program highlights contemporary film and video work produced within the past decade by an international lineup of queer Asian Pacific artists.

This program highlights works that have been produced in the last 10 years that carry the spirit of past queer API film and video history. Following the tradition of their predecessors, these artists embody a politic and aesthetic of transgression, experimentation, and an unapologetic display of sexuality, humor, camp, and political resistance. In particular, these artists utilize performance, music/audio, digital technologies, and unconventional narrative forms to bend and transcend notions of fixed identities, bodies, and geographies within a transnational Asian Pacific context.

ManChyna’s mouth watering Chinese Up Them Eyes Like Beyonce is a music video slathered with unapologetic humor, sex-positive antics, and sharp race critique. Defying both science and gravity, Lu Yang’s Uterus Man is an animated piece of eye-candy from Shanghai that introduces us to a superhero for the next queer generation. In I’m Fine, transgender filmmaker Tanwarin Sukkhapisit locks herself in a cage in front of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok in this compelling work that serves both as a document and performance of political intervention. By retooling audio recordings from an abandoned answering machine, Alison S. M. Kobayashi’s video Dan Carterblurs the lines between performance and reality with brilliant wit and humor. Neo-Victorian pop star Yozmit takes us to a higher level of human consciousness through her pulsating music video Sound of New Pussy through electronic dance beats and the sounds of a new language that celebrates sexual and gender liberation. The program tops off with Yvette Choy’s pornaoke sing-a-long, Part-Time Lover, as a love song anthem for a new queer generation.

Opening its doors on March 18th, 1967 at its original location on 51-53 Christopher, Stonewall Inn was the largest gay establishment in the US at its time. Without a liquor license, running water, or fire exits, Stonewall Inn was the only bar for homosexuals in NYC where dancing was allowed. Merely a few years later, June 28th, 1969 would mark a historic date in LGBTQ history as the site of the Stonewall riots, which has been regarded as the impetus for the gay liberation movement. As the NYPD violently attacked the establishment as an attempt to take it over, a riot ensued for multiple nights, igniting hundreds of members of the LGBTQ community to protest for their rights to space, expression, and liberation. Stonewall veterans Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, and countless other drag queens, transvestites, and transgender women of color were at the forefront of these riots. In a 2010 interview, Miss Major, a black transgender activist and Stonewall veteran stated, “Don’t listen to the white wash hype about Stonewall in 1969. It was black transgender women who where there at the forefront fighting for our human rights as we are still fighting for them today.”