Sinophilia 恋亚癖 (“Asian Fetishizer”)
Performed at Otion Front Studio, November 2024
In this piece, a white cis man is marked with the words 恋亚癖 (”Asian fetishizer”), etched into his skin using a tattoo machine, without ink. Stripping down tattoo to its basics – a bloodletting ceremony – skin is broken in ritual symbolism of the injurious effects of racialized fetishization.
There is no official slang word or term for “Asian fetishizer” in Chinese but 恋亚癖 (“Liàn yà pǐ”) comes close. Translating roughly to “obsession with loving Asians”, 恋 (“liàn”) means love, 亚 (“yà”) means Asian, while 癖 (“pǐ”) means “obsession”, and is also roughly translatable to “habit”, “fixation”, “hobby”, “weakness for”, “abnormal”, or “disorder”.
What to say of the interchangeability of trivialization and obsession, the way in which a fixation on a myriad group of people becomes blurred into a something as flippant as a hobby or mindless as a habit? What does it do to frame a fetish as a disorder? The fetishization of peoples, not things, that is — the turning of a person into an object.
Bound to a stockade, hooded, and anonymized, he is rendered object; fetish, much in the same way that racialized fetishization does to people of color. Made submissive, the racialized logics of domination and submission that predominantly characterize white fetishization of Asian men are flipped.
The fetishization of a people also extends to the fetishization of a culture. It’s a funny, annoying, jarring thing, seeing white people with Chinese tattoos on them who don’t speak, read, or write Chinese – funniest of all when they say nonsensical things like “water”, “beef”, or make no sense at all. It’s even funnier when they could look up the translation, but willfully don’t.
Chinese script is often stereotypically remarked upon as ‘beautiful’, ‘ornate’, or ‘elegant’. Fetishized for its decorative properties but dismissed for its meaning – in this piece these logics are once again flipped, and the white man is desecrated with the very language he sees as decorative.
