Synopsis: 

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I focus on embodying the concept of "Becoming a body," stemming from my personal journey as a gender dissident and sexual minority. This exploration of manhood and masculinity, repressed and refused within my assigned gender, involves adopting a "macho" image through muscle-building—a response to the powerlessness associated with expected male representation in our popular culture. This cycle between reality and representation makes the ideological fictions of gender dysphoria empirically true.

 

In today's evolving landscape of gender and sexual norms, the binary has constantly been challenged by activists and academia. How do I express my masculine identity within this context, where the current concept of masculinity is subject to debate and challenge? As a strategy, stereotyped/male-characteristic simultaneously secures my identity and highlights myself as a "victim" trapped by the stereotype—unconsciously confirming it by the very terms in which I try to oppose and resist it.

 

As the body performs, it gains fluency with a fragile sense of coherence, yet the relentless pursuit of the "ideal" masculine body remains elusive. Freud's theory on sexual/gender identity formation, marked by a split between accepted and rejected identifications, continues to haunt the individual. In the installation, each open-lidded box symbolises a stage to perform and a window to display—a dual representation. On one hand, it embodies the practice of representation; on the other, it reflects the process of self-objected-cathexis in identification.

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Medium and dimensions:

(size can be changed)

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Box: 30cm x 30cm x 10cm (depth) x 8 boxes

Weight: roughly 100g for each box

Materials: Waxed leather thread 0.1cm thick (red), Grey board 0.2cm thick, Metallic print, for the box cloth-black velvet inside and black leather outside, High-firm foam sheet 0.5cm thick, Acrylic, Superglue, Needle.