An Act of Folding: Beyond a Performative Category of the 'Queer

Tim Chng

Discourse on queerness has tended to assume a performatively political axis, instrumentalising a theory of the queer as an imperative revolt against heteronormative logics. Although such antagonistic conceptions of queerness remain invaluable sociotheoretical positions to consider, the past year has observed a privileging of a different facet of queerness that moves beyond the traditionally staid functions of subjective visibility and queer identity politics. In their review of the book ‘Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore’, Wong Bing Hao suggests the exigent need for a “non-binary methodology” of queer critique.1 This was a profound re-envisioning that expands an otherwise calcified category of “queerness” traditionally marked by the impassioned and polarising creature of protest. The recent work of curators and artists in Singapore similarly speak to a problematising of this performative category of the queered, divulging instead a political process of queering more so sustained by its acknowledgement of structural liquidities, foregrounded by a concerted drive towards divulging the generative horizons of a futural communality.

Josef Ng’s canonical performance, ‘Brother Cane’ (1994), remains a cogent encapsulation of the performative politics of queerness in Singapore. Enacting a series of emblematic actions involving the caning of slabs of tofu and bags of red dye, as well as the purported snipping of pubic hair in the presence of an audience, Ng ritualistically bemoaned the arrest of 12 gay men at Tanjong Rhu amidst an antigay operation by the police in 1993. In a reiteration of this performance, Loo Zihan’s ‘Cane’ (2012) sees the artist revisit Ng’s sensational protest through a recitation of textual accounts and sources, followed by a methodical re-enactment of the original piece, although with crucial divergences. Louis Ho points out that the considered decision on Loo’s part to exhibit a cleanly shaven crotch in contrast to Ng’s more visceral act signals a poignant “surrender of self-propagation”, coalescing an image of prepubescent adolescence with the admittedly non-reproductive capacities of queerness.2 Thus conceived, Loo’s becomes a renunciatory gesture against the heteronormative functionality ascribed to the procreative, Singaporean (male) body. More recently, Lenne Chai’s ‘A 377A Wedding’ (2018) conjures the spectre of Singapore’s legalistic castigation of queer intimacies, at once a titular jibe at and consciously cognisant depiction of the fantasy of a public, ceremonial endorsement of queer affection. As yet policed by socionational processes that remain governed by a dialectic of familial nuclearity, it appears thus that the political performative has historically figured as a necessarily emphatic aspect of artistic protests surrounding a notion of “the queer”.

Geraldine Lim, ‘After the Tunnel’, 2020. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Yet, it remains to be sufficiently justified just how effectively queerness might operate as certified by the self-assured performance of subjective visibilities. This becomes especially pronounced when internalised within the contexts of Singapore and, more broadly, Southeast Asia, where cultural configurations often predispose conspicuous queer identifications to a precarious condition of acute vulnerability.3 This is seen in Geraldine Lim’s ‘After the Tunnel’ (2020), which calls up the internal psychological and physical textures of the body, conflating the cathartic expulsion of queer subjectivities with the nervous anxiety of public exposure. These delicately denuded anatomies, enwrapped in velvet shades of soft fabric, capture the precarity of queer visibility and the elusive comfort this paradoxically affords. Although valuable in its mobilising of subjective agency, it appears that a professed performance of queer protest remains at best an inadequately accessible luxury, and the political efficacy of which seems applicably confined to certain social, racial and religious positionalities.

Aki Hassan, ‘A Tired Holder, Held and Holding’, 2021. Photograph by Marvin Tang.

Divaagar, ‘Render Tender’, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Such queer political performance would appear limiting as well in its reliance on the cartographies of a dyadic identity politics. In an essay that interrogates the ontological resonance of identity categories and its framing of queer subjective formation, Judith Butler posits the paradox of a queer identity category, offering instead a methodology of “working sexuality against identity”. 4 The group show ‘Maybe We Read Too Much Into Things’, curated by Berny Tan, featured a series of compellingly figurative, powder-coated steel sculptures by artist Aki Hassan, to which they offered the title ‘A Tired Holder, Held and Holding’ (2021). As much a curious play on words as they seem to entreat a reconsidered examination of acts of "holding", these gently motive sculptural “gestures” profess an artistic sensibility attuned to the poetics of a queer, bodily fatigue.5 What appears particularly evident here is the contemplative manifestation of a perpetual state of queer discomfort, engendered in the inevitable process of vacillating between states of "holding", and of being "held" by a queer disorientation. It became clear to me throughout my correspondence with the artist that “queerness” as a categorical identity was not something they consciously sought to excavate through their practice. A more alluring proposition might be to understand Hassan’s works as “queer” precisely in their engagement with “contingencies of process”, with queerness as politically creative only in its occupation of the capricious interstice between the nominal and the agitated activities of the processual. 6 In a similar vein, Divaagar’s ‘Render Tender’ (2020), a meditative installation that endeavours to expand putative definitions of intimacy and rehabilitation, offers a model of queerness grounded in the malleability and virtual interconnection of bodies. Drawing inspiration from the art of reiki, a Japanese method of spiritual healing predicated upon trust and touch, the artist here intimates the potential and, perhaps, urgency of a reparative, immaterial condition of physical and emotional interconnectedness. What exactly might we be impelled to “render tender”? What are the ramifications of a cosmic interrelation built upon virtual networks of care and intimacy, especially with regards to a definition of queerness? Hassan and Divaagar present an ideation of queering that appears to situate its political premise in the discursive texture of a tropological intertextuality that resists the detractive stasis of positivist categorisations of queered identities.

A “non-binary” application of queerness would appear as well to enliven the generative concept of a queer, futural communality, one not dissimilar to what Carlos Quijon Jr. considers the “auspicious sociality” of queer methodologies of making.7 This understanding of the ‘communal’ universality of a queer interrelation is deemed to proffer “latitude over lineage, … animated trajectories in favour of genealogies”,8 potentialising the poststructuralist, postcolonial qualities of queerness in realising neoteric modes of rhizomatic intra-activity.9 ‘Acts of Friendship’ (2019-21), a multi-media, participatory piece sees the artist nor investigate the intricate structures and intuitive connections that constitute the processes of current and potential relationships. Inviting participants to interact with them for a set period of time before encouraging written ruminations on present friendships in their lives, nor profoundly melds the intriguing latency of first impressions with the sweet nostalgia of remembrance. Thus conceived, nor evokes here a (queer) self that appears intrinsically mapped by cosmic networks of past, present and future affinities. Particularly redolent of this notion of queer ‘affinity’, the recent exhibition ‘In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War’, curated by Kathleen Ditzig and Carlos Quijon Jr., advances as well a postcolonial strand of "re-worlding" that speaks significantly to a queer ecology of convivial communality. Notable here is Ming Wong’s video piece ‘Sunu Jappo/手拉手/Hand in Hand’ which remobilises the historical imbrication of Chinese and Senegalese national narratives in advancing an ecology of "poetic relations" 10 more so characterised “by affinity rather than by citizenship”. 11 These separately conceived works of art reiterate the political potential of a queer optics that outdoes the repetitive polarities of a performative categorisation of queerness. They resist the unidirectionality of heteronormative logics that the latter subconsciously inscribes onto a teleological definition of queered political identities.

In being approached to contribute an essay on the (re)presentation of "queer art" in Singapore, it seemed to me that a necessary problematising of the category ‘queer’ was in order. As I have hoped to elucidate, an understanding of queerness as exercised in works of contemporary art might benefit from an appreciation of uniquely “non-binary methodologies” of queering, a view that especially resonates with the Deleuzian notion of the fold, where “what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding”. 12 Thus materialised, queerness locates its political force not in the performative reproduction of categorical hegemonies, but in the lateral and implosive act of folding, nevertheless producing productively unfamiliar dimensions of individual, social and postnational intertextualities.

Notes

1. Wong Bing Hao, "Non-Binary Methodology: Book Review of Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore", Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, no. 3 (2019): 217-226.

2. Louis Ho, “Loo Zihan and the Body Confessional”, in Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore, ed. Wernmei Yong Ade & Lim Lee Ching (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 40.

3. See Wong, 220.

4. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale & David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 307-320 (318), original emphasis.

5. Aki Hassan, ‘Berny Tan in conversation with Aki Hassan’, n.d., accessed March 11, 2021, https://maybewereadtoomuchintothings.com/akihassan/ .

6. "See Saw", Feb 3, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/diary/wong-bing-hao-onsingapore-art-week-2021-84964, emphasis mine.

7. See Carlos Quijon Jr., "Horizons of Queerness, Auspicious Sociality", Oct 7, 2020, https://post.moma.org/horizons-of-queerness-auspicious-sociality/.

8. Ibid.

9. See also Deleuze and Guattari’s juxtaposition of rhizomatic relatedness with genealogical lineage in their call to “oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production” that signifies as well a uniquely queer condition of interrelatedness; in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 241.

10. See Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) for an incisive view of the significance of "poetics of relation" and in particular "creolisation" in articulating a politically effective postcoloniality.

11. Kathleen Ditzig & Carlos Quijon Jr., “The Colours of World-Making: Afro- Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War”, in In Our Best Interests: Afro- Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War, exhibition catalogue, 9-15 (11).

12. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1999), 137.