Yajie Liang
Queer animality: a code of practice in Painting, Installation and Alter-politices

MPhil

Summary

This practice-led research of “Queer animality” looks at two interrelated questions. How do we transfer painting and installation into a kind of bestial act and gesture to respond to the implications of our own animality for the practice? How do biopolitics and institutional spaces in China read, measure and control “others” to keep their activities within the allowed range especially for nonhuman animals, queer, and non-binary people? This will build on paintings and installations that treat both animals and humans’ figures and spaces in heteronormativity, racialism, and animacy hierarchies intersectionally by considering the insistence collisions of race, animality, sexuality, and ability in the context of China. The references, of which installations in this research, span from Chinese legendary Beasts, to the hybrid creatures combining objecthood and animality in posthuman subcultures of “furries”; in pursuit of an alter-politics that grows from hybridization, aiming to test “animal”s viability as an alternative from a queer and autobiographical context.

Additional info

Based on a focus on identity/becoming, this research questions Donna Haraway's claims about companion animal in ethical actions, refuting human-dominated kinship between humans and animals. In order to make the argument, the research requires the move that brings in works on biocentric (Lemm: 2009; Norris: 1985), new materialism (Bennett, 2010; Barad: 2007; 2015; Coole and Frost :2010; Braidotti: 2013; Elizabeth Grosz: 2004), and queer identity studies (Butler: 1990;Engebretsen: 2014; Barad: 2015; Preciado: 2013), and poststructuralist conceptions of animal (Deleuze and Guattari: 1980; Derrida:2002). My hypothesis is that by problematizing the norms, subjectivity and standards of race, gender, and intimacy in mainstream Chinese society, analyzing an analogous mapping between these descriptions with the human's desire to categorize and control of animals (within imagined, lived or taxonomic intimacies), asking what lives are deemed visible in institutional spaces under the control of biopolicies, imaging a radically different approach to queer identity which as being a fluid corporeality emerging: one that becoming animal (Deleuze and Guattari: 1980), animacy (Chen: 2012), and entanglement (Barad: 2007). My intention of applying is to provide alternative perspectives through the lens of the other : the monster, the pet, the partner; an alternative perspective that is apart from the conventional viewpoint that otherness and stigmatization.

About

Yajie Liang (Liang Yaya), born in China in 1995. Yajie is an artist based in London currently. She studied at China Central Academy of Fine Arts (BA Chinese Painting, 2014-2018), and at the Royal College of Art (MA Painting, 2018-2020). Liang's work has exhibited in recent group shows: 50/50, Fold Gallery, London, UK; Final, not Over, Unit 1 Gallery, London, UK; The Circular Ruins, Hockney Gallery, RCA, London, UK; Oh, dear, Safe House, London, UK; Plastic Tongue, White House Gallery, London, UK; Lay with me, Dyson Gallery, RCA, London, UK; Work in Process, RCA, London, UK. Liang is a member of 5156 Ltd. which is an artist-run, not-for-profit association founded in Sep 2019 based in London.

Yajie Liang Clarice Starling, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm

Yajie Liang Komm, süsser Tod, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 35 cm

Yajie Liang The study of foot fetishism, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm

Yajie Liang Jack Torrance, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 95 x 60 cm

Yajie Liang Remus Lupine (detail), 2020, artificial hair, plastic, nail, glass, chain, gel, drawing on hairspray and artificial skin

Yajie Liang Remus Lupine (detail), 2020, artificial hair, plastic, nail, glass, chain, gel, drawing on hairspray and artificial skin