Chinoiserie Grand Gay Wedding
together with my wifey, Ziwei Huang
Performance, about 4 hours. July 2022 in Material, Zurich.
Second wedding, Feb 24, 2023 Synnika, Frankfurt am Main.
Third Wedding, March 26, 2023, 706 Berlin.
The European Wedding Tour will start this year.
This wedding tells the story of Chinese queers in exile. This wedding denounces the heteronormative marriage that reduces people to walking wombs, dish rags, breast pumps, sex slaves, exotic Szechuan spices and unholy virgins of the patriarchy. This wedding questions what it means when the law says 'marriage for all'. This wedding celebrates free love, friendship, sisterhood, immigrants, your European passports and our Chineseness, which brings us both joy and pain.
Video Documentation:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CpDtskYIdOZ/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CpDlpeQIc8t/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
https://www.instagram.com/tv/Cf_4eB3qqvm/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqnYRyWo7QF/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqqEHWrs9JW/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
https://www.instagram.com/p/CplaJWvqtH3/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNkT-KF7pjPrMNyTAVroUZX-To-xNYuul
Chinoiserie Grand Gay Wedding
We are a queer artistic couple, Chinoiserie. Our names are Huang Ziwei and Cheng Yumo. Yumo is a filmmaker, a performance artist, a writer, and a dominatrix based in Berlin. Ziwei is a photo-maker and an art historian based in Zurich. Since 2022, the two of us have been creating together, making videos, photography, art performances, and artistic concepts directly related to our experience in Europe as queer Chinese immigrants.
OUR WEDDING
Both working as creative individuals, we have a strong urge to share our experiences and express our burgeoning creativity. It is however hard for young queer immigrants like us to access institutional space and resources. Language, immigrant status, racism, homophobia, exploitation, performative diversity, financial limitation, and censorship are among the many obstacles we encountered. With the help of our friends and allies, we decided to create our own form of pop-up art performance/exhibition; to carve out a queer, Chinese space to accommodate our creativity in a predominantly White society.
We thought of Ang Lee’s 1993 movie, The Wedding Banquet, in which the gay Chinese protagonist hosted a fake straight wedding to convince his parents that he is straight. We decided a wedding banquet—its ritual, space, symbols, and meanings—is the best format for an exhibition. In the summer of 2022, we hosted a queer Chinese wedding in Zurich. Our wedding functioned as a multi-purpose and multi-layered event. It is a space for an art exhibition, gender performances, community gatherings, and queer celebrations; It is a space where we ridiculed various social issues such as Chinese traditions, heteronormality, gender roles, fake gay marriage (形婚 xinghun), marriage fraud, bride buying, and interracial marriage.
WHAT IS OUR WEDDING?
1. Our wedding is a curated, experimental exhibition. Conventional weddings, Western or Chinese, are ritual performances signifying the union of two binary genders. As gay marriage is gradually accepted by Western countries, representation of queer marriage is often seen in movies and tv series. However, Chinese queer wedding is rarely seen. We took this wedding as an opportunity to create:
1. Our own space of community gathering and kinship-making
2. Our own narrative of Chinese queer immigrant life
3. Our own definition of queer space, kinship, and marriage
We transformed a small art space into our wedding venue by bringing Chinese visual symbols, intimate private objects of our life, and our artworks. Our friends, family, allies, and curious strangers are invited to dine and celebrate with us. The most important spectacle is our queer Chinese bodies, animated with a lineup of Chinese wedding rituals, dance, lip sync performances, and cabernet performances inspired by Ballroom and BDSM culture.
2. Our wedding is a celebration of our love. We celebrate our love, friendship, and freedom. We celebrate our Chineseness, which brings us both joy and suffering. We celebrate the fact that we are alive at all in a state of orphanage. Our wedding is a bonfire where we and others alike gather in the endless coldness, where we laugh in our bitterness and 无奈 (wu nai). The wedding proves that it is possible to find happiness in hardship. It purges the negativity and gives fuel to move forwards.
3. Our wedding is a site of research on queer Chinese History. Our wedding brings together symbols of Chinese queer icons such as Leslie Cheung and Ren Hang. We also reference other cultural symbols and icons such as Teresa Teung and the Legends of White Snake to tease out the queer tangents of Chinese popular culture. Our wedding seeks to construct a symbolic system of Chinese queer culture, relevant to both the diasporic and Chinese communities. It aims to create a continuum of Chinese queer memory and inspire us and others to be proud of who we are.
4. Our Wedding is a manifesto of radical liberation. Our performance is a social experiment where we reclaim our agency from the discriminatory immigration system, patriarchy, heteronormative, and racial hierarchy. We created a space of temporary emancipation for ourselves and others alike. The wedding was a meeting ground for different forms of alliance and recalcitrance.