20’
2016
Book texts, photos, world map, red line, pins, and cassette tape
Stereo sound
文本，照片，世界地圖，紅線，圖釘和盒式錄音磁帶機錄音
二十分鐘
Song to Daphnis (2016) is a 20-minute sound work presented as a mixed-media installation comprising book texts, photographs, film screencaptures, a world map marked with a red line and pins, and a cassette tape player. The audio is structured as a narrated audiobook with stereo sound, in which my own voice tells a semi-fictionalised account of a relationship I had in London in the summer of 2015 with a man I call Mr. K — a self-identified rice queen, meaning a non-Asian man with an exclusive attraction to Asian men.
The audio does not consist of a single authored voice. It is a collage assembled from several distinct registers and sources: my own autobiographical narration, passages lifted and reworked from three novellas — John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly, Richard Mason's The World of Suzie Wong, and John F. Rooney's The Rice Queen Spy — fragments of real text messages, and the translated text of the aria “Un bel di, vedremo” from Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. The work opens with Shakespeare's Sonnet 119, which frames the entire piece: a poem about love that ruins and then reconstitutes itself into something stronger. Throughout the twenty minutes, Puccini's Madama Butterfly plays as a continuous underscore threading through each section. This is not incidental background music. Madama Butterfly is one of the most beautiful and most violently Orientalist works in the Western operatic canon — a story in which a Japanese woman waits faithfully for an American man who will not return in the way she imagines, and destroys herself in the process. By placing my own queer East Asian story of waiting, attachment, and departure directly on top of that operatic machinery, the piece refuses to let the Orientalist narrative play undisturbed.
The three novellas share a single structural feature: they are all stories of interracial desire written from a Western perspective, in which the Asian figure functions as the object of longing rather than its subject. By borrowing their language and folding it into my own narration, I do not simply critique these texts from the outside. Instead, I allow their language to contaminate my story and my story to contaminate theirs, until neither remains intact. The most direct political moment in the audio occurs in my own voice. I name the dynamic explicitly: “that being a rice queen is a holdover from colonialism, that the rice queen is always the master who makes and enforces the rules.” Rather than waiting for the desire to account for itself, I perform the analysis from inside the experience — speaking as the person who has been objectified, over the very operatic machinery that historically performed that objectification on his behalf.
The physical installation maps this entanglement onto space. Photographs and film screencaptures are pinned directly to the wall alongside the world map, its red line tracing the geography of the relationship — Hong Kong, London, Japan — rendering the personal as cartographic and the cartographic as intimate. The three films cited visually — Richard Quine's The World of Suzie Wong (1960), David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly (1993), and Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet《囍宴》(1993) — expand the scope of the collage: where the novellas are predominantly Western-authored narratives of interracial desire, Ang Lee's film introduces the specifically Chinese queer diasporic experience, and Cronenberg's M. Butterfly — adapted from David Henry Hwang's play — is itself already a deconstruction of Madama Butterfly from an East Asian perspective, making it the one source in the installation that enacts the same critique rather than serving as its target. The cassette player is both the source of the audio and a material object: analogue, bodily, prone to degradation, scaled to a single voice. Against the flattened imperial surface of the world map, it holds the irreducible specificity of one person's breath and hesitation.
The dual titles frame the work inside two traditions of speaking about queer desire through indirection. The Chinese title 子不語 (Zibuyu — "What the Master Would Not Discuss") quotes Confucius's deliberate silence on the transgressive, later reclaimed by the Qing Dynasty author Yuan Mei as the title of a collection of supernatural stories that includes the myth of the Leveret Spirit, who governs love between men. The English title Song to Daphnis references the Ancient Greek figure of Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes — an exchange of musical instruction that encodes erotic transmission between an older and a younger figure. Both titles speak about what cannot be spoken directly. The work attempts to speak it anyway, through borrowed voices, because at the time of making, I did not yet have the language of my own.
Song to Daphnis《子不語之歌》(2016)
《子不語之歌》Song to Daphnis (2016) 是一件時長二十分鐘的聲音裝置作品，由文本、照片、電影截圖、一張標有紅線和圖釘的世界地圖，以及一部盒式錄音磁帶機組成。錄音以有聲書的形式呈現，配以立體聲音效，以我自己的聲音講述一段發生於2015年夏天倫敦的半虛構關係——對象是一個我稱之為K先生的人，他是一位自稱的「米皇后」(rice queen)，即對亞洲男性有專一吸引力的非亞裔男性。
錄音並非由單一的作者聲音構成，而是一個由多種不同聲音和文本拼湊而成的混合體：我的自傳式旁白、從三本小說中借取和改寫的段落——約翰・路德・朗 (John Luther Long) 的《蝴蝶夫人》、李察・梅臣 (Richard Mason) 的《蘇絲黃的世界》以及約翰・F・朗尼 (John F. Rooney) 的《米皇后間諜》(The Rice Queen Spy)——真實短訊的片段，以及普契尼歌劇《蝴蝶夫人》詠嘆調《晴朗的一天》(Un bel di, vedremo) 的歌詞譯文。作品以莎士比亞第119首十四行詩開場，為整件作品定下框架：一首關於愛在毀滅後重新建立、並因此變得更為深厚的詩。在二十分鐘裡，普契尼的《蝴蝶夫人》以持續的底層音樂穿梭其中。這並非偶然的背景音樂。《蝴蝶夫人》是西方歌劇史上最美麗、同時也是最充滿東方主義暴力的作品之一——一個日本女人忠實地等待一個不會以她所想像的方式回來的美國男人，最終走向自我毀滅的故事。將我自身作為酷兒東亞人關於等待、依戀與離別的故事，直接疊置在這套歌劇機制之上，是對這套東方主義敘事的一種拒絕，不讓它安然運作。
這三本小說有一個共同的結構特徵：它們都是從西方視角書寫的跨族裔欲望故事，亞裔角色在其中充當渴望的客體，而非主體。借取它們的語言並將之編織入我自己的旁白，並非從外部批判這些文本，而是讓它們的語言污染我的故事、讓我的故事污染它們，直到兩者都不再完整。錄音中最直接的政治時刻出現在我自己的聲音裡。我明確地點名這種動態關係：做一個米皇后是殖民主義的遺存，米皇后永遠是制定和執行規則的一方，因此無法自稱受害者。我沒有等待欲望自行為自己作出交代，而是從經歷的內部進行分析——以一個曾被客體化的人的聲音，覆蓋在那套歷史上代他說話、代他被客體化的歌劇機制之上。
這件裝置的實體部分將這種糾纏映射到空間之中。照片和電影截圖直接釘在牆上，旁邊是那張世界地圖，紅線勾勒出這段關係的地理輪廓——香港、倫敦、日本——將私人的化為地圖式的，將地圖式的化為私密的。視覺上引用的三部電影——李察・昆尼 (Richard Quine) 的《蘇絲黃的世界》(1960)、大衛・柯能堡 (David Cronenberg) 的《蝴蝶君》M. Butterfly (1993)，以及李安的《囍宴》The Wedding Banquet (1993)——擴展了拼貼的範圍：小說主要是西方視角下的跨族裔欲望敘事，而李安的電影引入了華人酷兒離散的具體經驗，柯能堡的《蝴蝶君》——改編自黃哲倫 (David Henry Hwang) 的舞台劇——本身已是從東亞視角對《蝴蝶夫人》的解構，使它成為裝置中唯一一個本身已在執行同一批判、而非作為批判對象的來源文本。盒式錄音磁帶機既是聲音的來源，也是一件物質對象：類比的、身體性的、容易降解的，以一把聲音的尺度製造。在那張被壓平的帝國地圖表面前，它保存著一個人的呼吸與猶豫，無可替代。
兩個標題將作品置於兩種以迂迴方式言說酷兒欲望的傳統之中。中文標題《子不語》取自《論語》孔子對越軌之事的刻意沉默，後被清代袁枚借題，著有《子不語》一書，當中收錄《兔兒神》等篇，記載掌管男男之情的神祇。英文標題《Song to Daphnis》取自古希臘神話中牧神潘（Pan）教授達菲尼斯（Daphnis）吹排笛的意象——一段以音樂教學為媒介的情慾傳遞。兩個標題都在說一些無法直接言說的事。這件作品嘗試用借來的聲音把它說出來，因為在創作的當下，我還沒有找到屬於自己的語言。