My body is warming up, please wait for a while
My body is warming up, please wait for a while
This project emerged from my experiences with dating apps over the past year. Initially, it served as a documentation of my inner struggles as the ‘other’ within romantic encounters: romanticised, alienated, objectified, and subjected to the gaze of the other. At the same time, these encounters became a site of mutual and self-inquiry, raising questions around reflexivity, desire, and the ways in which we perceive and construct one another. The work initially took the form of fragmentary, personal writing, untethered to genre and moving between essay, poetry, and prose. Writing has become for me a vessel and a conduit for emotions; it holds experiences that are fragmented and intimate, eluding capture within a definitive narrative.
Gradually, the project expanded into an inquiry into how this ‘otherness’ is constructed through the other identities I embody—as an Asian, a foreigner, or a woman. Many of these experiences ultimately seem to trace back to colonialism: the colonisation of the body, the colonised body. Within the project, dating serves as merely a micro-context, yet simultaneously functions as a space where social power dynamics become visible and are negotiated. The politics of embodiment and corporeality seem to form an inescapable framework for me.
At the same time, this leads to another question: how can we maximise dis-identification, degendering, and the erasure of racial boundaries? When we shed these symbolic layers and simply encounter one another as real human beings, who am I then, and who are you? This is the expression I ultimately wish to convey most powerfully.
This project emerged from my experiences with dating apps over the past year. Initially, it served as a documentation of my inner struggles as the ‘other’ within romantic encounters: romanticised, alienated, objectified, and subjected to the gaze of the other. At the same time, these encounters became a site of mutual and self-inquiry, raising questions around reflexivity, desire, and the ways in which we perceive and construct one another. The work initially took the form of fragmentary, personal writing, untethered to genre and moving between essay, poetry, and prose. Writing has become for me a vessel and a conduit for emotions; it holds experiences that are fragmented and intimate, eluding capture within a definitive narrative.
Gradually, the project expanded into an inquiry into how this ‘otherness’ is constructed through the other identities I embody—as an Asian, a foreigner, or a woman. Many of these experiences ultimately seem to trace back to colonialism: the colonisation of the body, the colonised body. Within the project, dating serves as merely a micro-context, yet simultaneously functions as a space where social power dynamics become visible and are negotiated. The politics of embodiment and corporeality seem to form an inescapable framework for me.
At the same time, this leads to another question: how can we maximise dis-identification, degendering, and the erasure of racial boundaries? When we shed these symbolic layers and simply encounter one another as real human beings, who am I then, and who are you? This is the expression I ultimately wish to convey most powerfully.
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