‘Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality’ Plays With Binaries

Geraldine Javier’s Amerika (2024) greets me as I enter ‘Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality’ at Silverlens in New York, a show constellating cross-disciplinary work by seven artists from underrepresented communities bearing ties with the larger Asian diaspora. The exhibition opens with Javier’s orange tapestry: a tribute to Seattle’s ‘transit fairy’ Pauline Van Senus, who is often spotted, adorned with plastic sunflowers, cleaning up trash around the city’s bus stops. In this devotional piece, Van Senus is depicted in a bed of blooming, hand-embroidered sunflowers.

A set of plush red curtains in the gallery leads to a side room, where the drapes are replicated onscreen in Sin Wai Kin’s video Irreconcilable Differences (2020). Sin plays two hyper-femme characters, staging a dialogue between them. The platinum-haired ‘Jessica Rabbit’ on the left makes garbled, nonsensical sounds, which are returned with disdain by the woman to her right: a sexualized ‘Lin Daiyu’ figure, representing the stereotypical sentimental woman in modern Chinese literature as depicted on the painted round fan, or tuanshan, that she holds. Their prelinguistic exchange slips between cacophony and harmony; eventually, their murmurs swallow one another, to ASMR-like effect. These performances of femininity explore the ways in which female speech is cast as illegible and impenetrable to the extent that cross-cultural exchange seems impossible.

Ming Wong approaches the fetishization of ‘the other’ differently in the mixed-media installation Bloody Marys – Song of the South Seas (2018–24). The artist, with an occasional conspicuous grin, performs as Bloody Mary from South Pacific (1958), the film adaptation of the eponymous musical, which saw African American actress Juanita Hall portray the South Pacific islander. Wong’s video features original film footage in which Hall, overdubbed by singer Muriel Smith, performs ‘Bali-Ha’i’ – a siren song with colonial underpinnings. The video is also interlaced with clips of various ‘Bloody Marys’ performing in school productions; the musical’s ongoing popularity continues to perpetuate a colonial fantasy involving racial ambiguity and ‘benevolent assimilation’. Wong subverts the complicity of adaptation and reinterpretation with his over-the-top performance, which conveys abrasive self-awareness of his embodied otherness.

Other works take the titular ‘hard reality’ as a departure point. Eisa Jocson’s single-channel video Stainless Borders: Deconstructing Architectures of Control (2010) evaluates flagpoles, signposts and pillars. By pole dancing on these structures, Jocson recontextualizes the activity while challenging the restrictive ways in which such architectural elements direct people to move their bodies or exist in space. Oftentimes, Jocson appears to struggle, her skin rubbing against and smearing the structures – a gesture which is poetically echoed by Tosh Basco’s 2023 series of pigment-on-paper works, ‘Untitled blue’. The artist, covered in cobalt pigment, made these imprints through intimate bodily contact with the page.

The body is also front and centre in Citra Sasmita’s Song of Divine Realm (2024). Iconographically protesting the patriarchal Kamasan painting tradition, this monumental scroll depicts a matrilineal universe of female icons whose wombs breed flames and branches. Nearby, Yasue Maetake’s Phoenix Natus (2024) features seashells and corals crystallized in epoxy, as if fossilized, on a carved-driftwood spine. Maetake’s meticulously crafted sculpture makes material movement a hardened reality; it also formally echoes the vertical structures in Jocson’s video, but without their disciplinary function.

Every work in ‘Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality’ strives to disclose its own ideals, disruptions, and experiments. The titular opposition can be read as a shift away from – a refusal of – the Western art world’s tendency to group work by Asian or Asian-diasporic artists into a flattening, identity-based framework. This show’s anti-essentialist approach not only supports artistic expression without imposing predetermined cultural and racial interpretations, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, offers a chance at affinities outside of the basis of identity.

‘Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality’ is on view at Silverlens, New York, until 24 August

^{Main image: Ming Wong, Bloody Marys – Song of the South Seas, 2018–24 (detail), mixed media installation featuring single channel video and copies of cinema ephemera. Courtesy: the artist and Silverlens, New York}