![\"Photography:](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0317_F.jpg\")
Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
Artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang explores the relationship between the self, identity and the narratives that construct them while focusing on subcultures and sites of cul\u00adtural resistance. In her club perfor\u00admances, boychild channels a raw, genderless being, whose muscular body contorts as if guided exter\u00adnally, while lip-synching to dark electronic remixes of Beyonc\u00e9 and Rihanna. The artists collaborate in film (they recently premiered \u201cA day in the life of bliss\u201d in Berlin), photography and performance. Sleek caught up with the duo on Skype while they were preparing for a performance at the MCA, Chicago.
\nSleek: Let\u2019s talk about the importance of nightlife to your work. Wu, you did a line of parties called Wildness with DJs<\/b> Nguzunguzu and Total Freedom at the Silver Platter, a 60s landmark bar in L.A. that became home to the Latin\/LGBT immigrant communities. The club was the subject of your first feature film, \u201cWildness\u201d, and your installation at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. And boychild, your performance grew out of the San Francisco drag scene<\/b>.
\nBC: Nightlife is important for my work because it creates a space for me to exist; nothing contextu\u00adalises my performance the same way as these places do. It\u2019s my world, my existence in the under\u00adground. Also, I exist in a world that comes after the internet, so my adolescence was spent finding things there. The underground ex\u00adists on the internet for me. As far as the way that people experience and perceive my performance, they\u2019ll just see it at a club and I think that\u2019s special, magical and spontaneous in a way that it\u2019s not in other places. I performed in drag spaces, but the most drag thing about my performance is that I lip-\u00adsynch. I never really felt like a drag queen even though I always really wanted to. [Laughs]
\nThere\u2019s also a thing about the sincerity of nightlife; people are so present and unpretentious in a certain way. You\u2019re on the same level with the performance and the viewer; you\u2019re on the floor to\u00adgether having the experience. I performed in festivals with sev\u00aderal hundred people and there it\u2019s more important to create boundaries in the dynamics of performer and viewer.
\nWT: It\u2019s creating a shared space versus dominating.
\nBC: Yes!<\/p>\n
![\"Photography:](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0118_F.jpg\")
Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
WT: I agree that nightlife is im\u00adportant to my work in different ways, though I share a lot of the appreciation that boychild does. There\u2019s a tradition of queer night\u00ad life spaces being places that people needed, to figure out who you are, not having a support group or a family in a way, and some of the communities that have come out of that. It\u2019s queer people starting a club to have a place to go basically, a safe space. And a lot of the clubs that we go to may not function like that in general, but the people that throw the parties are people that come from that.
\nThat\u2019s important to me that there is a queer paradigm, and I say queer meaning maybe the party is super mixed, but they have some relationship to where the music comes from and how those clubs started. What I love about those spaces is that when you go in, you can leave a lot of things behind. You can just be a certain kind of person in that space and share it with people and there\u2019s some kind of sincerity, of letting down a lot of social roles.<\/p>\n
![\"Photography:](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0228_F.jpg\")
Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
You both appropriate mainstream tropes in your work. Appropriation is a vital practice for any subculture seeking subversion.<\/b> \nWT: For me, appropriation means something very specific; I work with appropriation in a lot of my films, quoting material and re\u00adcontextualising it. Cinema has such a rich tradition, whenever I make a film I\u2019m aware that everything I do will always bear a relationship to things that have been done in the past. I\u2019m always looking at what the continuities are and trying to acknowledge that they exist, and acknowledge where the inspiration comes from.
\nBLIS [boychild\u2019s film character] is very much a character that I cre\u00adated; I don\u2019t see her as boychild. In sci-fi, if you\u2019re going for a genre, there are a lot of tropes that work very well to embrace. A story about a character is only really interesting if she has flaws. So BLIS is a su\u00adperhero, and it\u2019s a special day, the day she discovers she has this mu\u00adtant superpower. It\u2019s a superhero origin story.
\nI built her character around thinking about what some of the obstacles might be in the world and how she might overcome them. And it has to do with looking. In the film, the surveillance system is this AI called the LOOKS, it\u2019s about looking and being looked at. She has a dual relationship to that activity. She enjoys the attention, but it can be really scary how fans obsess about her. Also, some peo\u00adple “look” out of appreciation and fascination and some “look” with disgust and fear \u2013 it\u2019s the spectrum of that experience. These emo\u00adtional experiences are very univer\u00adsal, showing ways that we might all relate to social media. And also being queer in the world and how it feels to be stared at.<\/p>\n
![\"Photography:](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0298_F.jpg\")
Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
I think the term queerness has come to represent, rather than specifically gender identity politics, also a way of being in the world that is a heightened form of critique alongside cultural production.<\/b> \nWT: When I was doing Wildness, we always had a performance and we liked that it was a drag bar with a drag stage lighting and d\u00e9cor. We\u2019d invite people and tell them everything can be drag, because we\u2019re all basically performing social roles. people talk about “realness”, how real can you be this or that. or how you\u2019re completely not these things. In that sense I was always excited about boychild\u2019s performance and I also thought about it as drag, though, as she said, she\u2019s not \u201cdrag queen\u201d\u00ad drag but drag as in all the different ways that we might channel cul\u00adtural references and combine them.
\nDrag is like the art of appropriation in a way, how you pick and choose references and put them together. And especially now, that the internet has broadened our spectrum of references, it\u2019s interesting how we pick and choose. It\u2019s not just the one thing that you can find, it\u2019s everything you have access to. It can be overwhelming but it can also create amazing art. The music is also really important whenever we talk about nightlife and the underground. [DJ] Total Freedom talks about how being a DJ is not just about giving people the feed, like the pop culture feed, but showing them where the feed comes from. I feel like boychild\u2019s performance has that quality to it too.
\nBC: There\u2019s a number of people whom I\u2019m very lucky to call my friends, who have a way with sound similar to what I have with the body. Wu and I did this exer\u00adcise together, in the first stages of understanding each other and our respective work, where I tried to explain my performative language and movement; there\u2019s a way in which sound moves me that is es\u00adsential to my work and also cor\u00adrelates to the things Wu wants to say. I love the way that certain DJs will take a pop song and make it totally gruesome and dark, but also super alive and emotional.
\nWT: Like the pop diva\u2019s voice, and what makes us all obsessed with someone like Rihanna or Beyonc\u00e9. Total Freedom will somehow cap\u00adture that, but then also capture some feeling like you\u2019re falling or being sucked into a vortex. Both those experiences are in a remix at the same time. I feel like boy\u00adchild\u2019s performance is like that too: the things about pop and spectacle and fantasy which are why we\u2019re all wrapped up in that kind of cul\u00adture production, but also the feel\u00ading in our bodies and ourselves of being grounded on the earth, hurting in pain, suffering.
\nBC: Life sucks! [Laughs]<\/p>\n
![\"Photography:](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0252_F.jpg\")
Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
WT: The whole industry manipulates us. The internet exaggerates our celebrity obsession, it gives us distractions but it also gives us constant reminders of how fucked up the world is. We\u2019re living in this constant state of distraction and of feeling hopeless and emotional. At least that\u2019s how boychild and I feel.
\nBC: It\u2019s also my relationship to music because it\u2019s my way of be\u00ading. It\u2019s more fun, instead of work\u00ad ing against pop culture, to work within it, recontextualise it and appropriate things. Relating that to my queer identity, if I were fighting the mainstream or the non-queer world I\u2019d constantly just be fighting, instead of enjoying the really wonderful things about life, you know? And that\u2019s the nightlife too, there are people and projects that might not identify thems\u00adelves as queer, but represent some new ways of breaking down the structure of the mainstream in a way that feels very queer to me.
\nWT: Talking about subculture and my interest in it and the idea of counterculture as being against the mainstream, that\u2019s a model that doesn\u2019t really work anymore be\u00adcause it\u2019s a dead-\u00adend idea that the world is black and white, and that you can resist the things that are capitalist and patriarchal. That\u2019s just the moment we live in. There\u2019s a lot of irony in the way people ap\u00adpropriate pop culture and embrace corporate aesthetics, like normcore and all these things. There\u2019s a lot of irony but it also comes from ambivalence about what the fuck to do. We have a love\/hate relation\u00ad ship to these things, because if we reject them all, we will be para\u00adlysed, so there has to be a way to move through it, and to make art.
\nYou also perform the work \u201cMoved by the Motion\u201d, where Wu is the voice and boychild the mover. There\u2019s a spiritual ele- ment to it, like an Ur-form breaking down to a bodiless mind and a guided body.<\/b> \nBC: Each iteration of \u201cMoved by the Motion\u201d is different depending on the space. Tonight\u2019s perfor\u00admance is in a black box theatre and is a lot more theatrical. I\u2019m ex\u00adcited because my performance works in these settings, with chan\u00adnels and spirits, my makeup and the lights. It feels a lot more spir\u00aditual to me in that sense; it really accentuates the dichotomy of the voice and the performer or the body. Would you agree?
\nWT: Uhuh. We each represent di\u00admensions of the psyche of the character of BLIS. She has this dream, and we each play different parts of her persona that come up in the dream. When we first start\u00aded working together, we came up with this idea of different charac\u00adters associated with different types of boychild\u2019s movement. And so the voice and the mover is really about thinking about body lan\u00adguage versus verbal language, and how we can create a space between us that evokes certain emotional states. like, how a word can affect our understanding of the experi\u00adence, but also how movement cre\u00adates an emotional experience that might be outside of language.<\/p>\n
![\"Photography:](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0278_F.jpg\")
Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a series of photos, and the one titled \u201cA Child and a Man on his Deathbed in One Body\u201d deals with duality, of the two of you being two sides of one thing.<\/b> \nBC: The photos in the exhibition are the physical embodiment of the four aspects of BLIS\u2019 character. The one you\u2019re referencing shows a character called \u201cThe Jester\u201d; it\u2019s about the thing in your conscious\u00adness that are two things pulling at you. For me it represents the am\u00adbivalence that I have towards pop culture. The jester is about what\u2019s happening in your mind, those battles, trying to translate informa\u00adtion that exists in the world, the internet and on the feed…
\nWT: …and sort of like anarchy and total destruction, the part of you that enjoys the pain of others. The Joker in Batman represents this kind of almost philosophical point of view, that there\u2019s nothing precious to hold on to. These archetypal figures, I think, are in all of us.<\/p>\n
![\"boychild.](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0408_F.jpg\")
boychild. Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
Wu, a short film you directed for PBS [the US Public Broadcaster], \u201cYou\u2019re Dead to Me\u201d, just won an IMAGEN award. How\u2019s film-making different to you than art-making?<\/b> \nWT: The biggest differences are audience and context. Films circu\u00adlate differently than art works. Art is for me very site-specific, and allows a more full body experience; how you walk into a room, what the sound feels like, how big is the image. You can really affect people on a lot of levels with scale and volume \u2013 but it also limits your audience. Films can circulate on a lot of different platforms, they can be shared or people can encounter them in a personal, individual way.
\nOr collectively. But they require different things narratively. I\u2019m also interested in that tension \u2013 they\u2019re almost antithetical to each other. It\u2019s almost impossible to do work that functions as both. We\u2019re now working on a version of \u201cbliss\u201d that will be a bigger feature film, where you can follow the character of BLIS from beginning to end, for the whole day.<\/p>\n
![\"Wu](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SHEFF_Wu_BoyChild_0376_F.jpg\")
Wu Tsang. Photography: Bryan Sheffield<\/p>\n
Text by Hili Perlson<\/a><\/strong> \nPhotography by Bran Sheffield<\/strong> \nTaken from Sleek Magazine 43: Youth\/Truth<\/a><\/strong> \nSee more print features here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Photography: Bryan Sheffield Artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang explores the relationship between the self, identity and the narratives that construct them while focusing on subcultures and sites of cul\u00adtural resistance. In her club perfor\u00admances, boychild channels a raw, genderless being, whose muscular body contorts as if guided exter\u00adnally, while lip-synching to dark electronic remixes of…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[1848,1849,115,1045,1850,344,1663,1851],"class_list":["post-17436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-boychild","tag-drag","tag-hili-perlson","tag-performance","tag-queer","tag-sleek-magazine","tag-sleek-magazine-43","tag-wu-tsang"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n