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“It’s been more than a decade since ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and ‘Letters From Iwo Jima,’ the last major studio pictures to feature all-Asian ensembles, and a full quarter-century since ‘The Joy Luck Club,’ the last such production to grapple with the puzzle of contemporary Asian American identity. Those ridiculous statistics have saddled ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ with equally ridiculous expectations; that future Asian-led projects are riding on this movie’s box-office success makes it awfully hard not to root for,” the LA Times writes on Crazy Rich Asians.

My father told me about the movie almost a year before the release date, gesticulating wildly with excitement as he described the premise. We have to go watch, he had told me, because the cast is all-Asian! His excitement was palpable and infectious and I couldn’t help but also be swept along with inarticulable-at-the-time anticipation of seeing people who looked like me on the big screen. We went a year later, and I cheered, along with rows of majority-Asian moviegoers, when Michelle Yeoh’s character bought out an entire hotel in response to a snobby hotel receptionist’s racist remarks.

In this scene and many others throughout Crazy Rich Asians, instances of what Cathy Park Hong describes as “capitalism as retribution for racism” – in this case, obscene wealth as an answer to racism – are portrayed. In Hong’s memoir Minor Feelings, she then asks, “But isn’t that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it’s through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?” The feeling that many Asian moviegoers got when they saw representation on the big screen should in no way be discounted, but what does it mean when onscreen Asianness is sold to us as a way to imagine what liberation could look like, but conflates that liberation with wealth? Why does Crazy Rich Asians choose to imply Michelle Yeoh’s character has “overcome” racism through her wealth and willingness to wield it as a defensive tool? Can this be the extent to what we imagine liberation to be? Who are we, indeed, when we excel in a capitalist system that has destroyed us?

Crazy Rich Asians also presents itself as intentional media creation as a means of liberation from side character-ness, cheap stereotype jokes, and, in short, lack of dimensionality in the eyes of the moviegoer. “The media surrounding CRA cruelly encouraged the idea that a minoritized group or person achieves full psychic personhood only upon their recognition as a market—and as marketable,” writes Melissa Phruksachart in The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism: Crazy Rich Asians. “Messianic visibility diverts race consciousness from political resistance into an overidentification with capital.” Crazy Rich Asians, Phruksachart argues, conflates the validation of Asian/ American personhood with box-office receipts, pushing Asian visibility as an untapped market and presenting the movie as the cure.

This movie has managed to bottle Asian/American identity and shake it alluringly at an audience to whom nothing has been sold in a long time – we have to go watch, because the cast is all-Asian! The art piece seeks to make this commodification of identity clear and ask: Why is Asian/American validation of personhood by media dependent on being recognized by a market? What systems do we perpetuate when we commodify identity, and then pass judgment on its validity based on its consumption? What do we imagine liberation to be, when Crazy Rich Asians stands as its pinnacle in the media?

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Blepharoplasty. Skin bleach. Rhinoplasty. Jaw shaving.

For its high rates of commercial cosmetic surgery, South Korea has oftentimes been called “the plastic surgery capital of the world.” As the Korean entertainment industry has taken global stage, the pressure to appeal to visual appetites has only gotten stronger. But the aforementioned has only proved to be a losing game, for beauty continues to find its homolog in whiteness — amongst the most popular desired features are a high nose bridge, double eyelids, pale skin, a thin, oval face.

South Koreans have found themselves pinned to boundary spaces, between fetishistic desire and a beauty standard that has, from its very origin, abhorred the Asian.

Bound to the history of a practice that has enabled Western ideals to prey upon Eastern physiognomist traditions.

Rhino explores how our bodies — our flesh, our embodied race, even our understanding of ourselves as images — end up consumed by the media we produce.