Essay by Shing Hei Nathan Man
As a queer Hong Kong immigrant residing and working in so-called Australia, I navigate the affective residues of displacement, repression, and racialised hyper-visibility. “Clinical psychology tells us that trauma is the ultimate killer. Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics,” (Lady Gaga 2011). Trauma does not simply fade: it lingers, accumulates, imprinting into bodies, surfaces and space. My practice is situated in this complex intersection between diaspora and queerness. I seek to respond to physical and psychological displacement through explorations of forms, surfaces and spatial installation informed by minimalistic symbolism and unconventional materiality. This essay reflects on my methods of materialising trauma and queer temporality through my art practice, by examining my past and current works such as PärÅdißé (2024) and HOLDING ROOM (2025). In particular, I analyse the employment of minimal visual symbolic cues, as a survival strategy in the face of institutional confrontation, as well as the cultivation of ambiguity, nuance and sensory disorientation.
Drawing on Cuban-American queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) theory of queer temporality, which frames queerness as a horizon of potential rather than a fixed identity in the present, my work examines how queer migrants intentionally resist closure and resolution. I also engage with critical race theorist David Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han’s concept of “racial melancholia” (Eng and Han 2019), articulating the psychological toll of failed assimilation attempts and the lingering sense of loss experienced by ethnic subjects navigating western contexts (Eng and Han 2019). Further grounding is provided by cultural studies professor Ee Ling Quah and gender and queer studies professor Tang Shawna’s research on queer Chinese migrants in Australia, which highlights the entangled pressures of racialisation and queer legibility, and the refusal of legibility as a form of survival. Together, these frameworks allow me to critically situate my practice within the broader discussion of migrant status and diasporic experience, especially regarding misrecognition and misrepresentation within western institutional frameworks. French curator and writer Nicholas Bourriaud’s influential work Relational Aesthetics and cultural critic Rey Chow’s critique of coercive mimeticism provide a further framework by which we can think about the intersections of cultural legibility and affective opacity. As this essay expands, my practice of performance through space and materiality can be understood as navigating the push and pull between yearning and refusing legibility—a dialogue between the conflicting impulses of seeking recognition within dominant structures while resisting the erasures such understanding demands.
Context and Theoretical Framework
Emerging from a space of disorientation, my work explores the intersections of queer identity, migration, and trauma. These experiences do not follow a clean-cut timeline; instead, they overlap and intertwine. In Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), he deconstructs queerness from the normative framework of “straight time”, which he defines as the normative temporal framework of heteronormativity (Muñoz 2009). Muñoz argues that queer temporality is a form of resistance against an organised world defined by laws of capitalism and reproduction – the nine-to-five work life, institutions like marriage, and the nuclear family. He describes queerness as “not yet here”, suggesting that queerness should exist in the “then and there” (Muñoz 2009:14). In other words, a utopic horizon of potentiality — a way of being that gestures towards a future way of living that rejects compulsory assimilation and legibility.
Building on this theory of queer temporality, Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) offers a broader understanding of the disorienting experience and discomfort felt not only emotionally or physically but also on a political scale. Ahmed writes that as queerness diverts an individual away from “straight time” or the heteronormative timeline – this act disorients the individual by causing it to be out of line – sexually, culturally, racially, and spatially – by misaligning the individual with their expected trajectories (Ahmed 2006). This idea of disorientation and misalignment became a focal point in my theoretical exploration. It is something I deeply relate to. As a queer racialised individual, I have often felt misaligned with the various orientations of institutional expectations from both the East and west. Ahmed’s theory alongside Muñoz’s framework allows for a more full-body understanding of the positions of a queer identity, not as a fixed, singular role but as a mode of navigation. Misalignment, therefore, becomes not a failure to integrate but a generative mode of being – a space from which to imagine and inhabit alternative futures (Halberstam 2011).
Just as queerness disrupts the normative timeline, racial melancholia unsettles the flow of assimilation of migrants into a new society, disrupting the image of the “successful immigrant” (Eng and Han 2019). In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation (2019), Eng and Hang’s argument frames melancholia as a constant state of mourning which haunts migrants with the burden of not only the grief of cultural loss but also the impossible demands of assimilation. This mourning is not a one-off event but a ongoing cycle, a state of being. My own experience mirrors Eng and Han’s version of melancholia characterised by a constant state of dislocation (Eng and Han 2019). After migrating to Australia alone and surviving conversion therapy in California, I have learned to find belonging through experiencing this state of limbo. I exist in a constant state of not belonging. The trauma of rejection and not fitting in, coupled with the cultural erasure required to operate and live within a Western society, has profoundly shaped my current practice and research. Eng and Han describe this condition as a “double loss” (Eng and Han 2019:685), a severance from a past to which one can never return, and a disconnection from a future that demands assimilation through self-erasure.
This sentiment is also reflected in Rey Chow’s critique of the distilled cultural identity. In The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002), Chow highlights the overdetermination and generalisation of racialised individuals by framing representation through the Western gaze. Her analysis reveals the extremity of this phenomenon, extending beyond individuals to the level of the state, reflecting an institutional condition of being made to conform within the guidelines of gender, race, and nationality.
Each of these theoretical contributions informs my work in different ways. I use my art less as a visual stimulant but instead as a platform for connection. I find great pleasure when my art successfully reaches an audience and when viewers are able to give me feedback like “I know exactly who this is…” or “I’ve felt like this, but I was never able to articulate it…”. I think, in essence, a lot of migrants of my generation grew up the same way I did – our parents told us the same things and we compartmentalised them in similar ways. I relate this to Bourriaud’s concept of “microtopias” (Bourriaud 1998). In this context, art is a site of utopic moments of conviviality between artist and audience. Bourriaud writes that relational art is a form of resistance to alienation, serving as a universal language and framework where social interaction and reflection are the true mediums, with art acting more as a catalyst (Bourriaud 1998). I found this path of thinking optimistic and seductive, but I also recognise that, in some ways, Bourriaud disregards an important part of the conversation around who gets to participate, who is allowed, and who allows. That is, Bourriaud fails to account for the uneven conditions in which relationships are formed – the racial, the gendered, the colonial structures that dictate who is included, who feels safe, who is allowed to experience the aesthetics (Bishop 2004). The “microtopia” is then a fantasised, levelled platform, which for a lot of queer-migrant bodies does not exist.
Conversely, my practice does not exist in this liberal frictionless society that Bourriaud’s “microtopia” assumes. Instead, I see it is more shaped by “cultural friction” (Quah and Tang 2024). Coined by Ee Ling Quah and Shawna Tang in their research ‘Racialised Queer Chinese Migrants in Australia: Entanglements of Queerness and Chineseness’, this friction is not intersectional but antagonistic, a dissonance of existing between multiple planes of visibility and invisibility, writing that: “Chineseness and queerness do not simply coexist in parallel, but tangle, collide and complicate each other’s expression” (Quah and Tang 2024:12). This resonates deeply with my own legibility in Australia, especially when it comes to the academic realm, where my hypervisibility as a racialised international student intersects with being understood as both a queer individual and an art practitioner learning within a Western academic institution. In my three years of art school, I have understood that Australian academics and Western people love an immigrant struggle story. My “tragic past” and “tough childhood” are reduced to sob stories that are tokenised and flattened for institutional consumption (Puar 2007). My struggle is no longer about me but about the viewer who feels bad and offers condolences. Visibility is therefore not inherently emancipatory. It is a form of examination and discipline – the liberal imperative of “coming out”. To speak vulnerably from within trauma often invites misinterpretation, appropriation, or distortion, especially under the white gaze. Self-protection, silence, opacity, or partiality become strategies of refusal rather than absence. My practice resists this demand for clarity through what Édouard Glissant calls “the right to opacity” (Glissant 1997:190). Or rather, refusing to be read, known, translated and understood as a whole on foreign terms (Glissant 1997). Through the autonomy of refusing translation, silence becomes power. Rather than performing trauma for institutional consumption, my work creates spaces of encrypted meaning that resist interpretation while still effectively communicating with those who shared similar experiences of displacement and misrecognition.
Materiality in Silence
In my current installation project, HOLDING ROOM (2025), I explore the dissonance between being seen and being understood through the frameworks of race, institution, and diaspora. I reflect on my experience living, studying, and working as a migrant. I noticed this persistent gap in my perception between my identity and intentions, and how a Western society perceives those values. This gap, between East and West, expression and reception, is manifested through a room installation that mimics this state of vacuum – a state of unease, estrangement, mistranslation – a sterile “no man’s zone” for all things lost in translation.
HOLDING ROOM is therefore materially sparse, consisting of glossy white tiles (Figure 1), utilitarian fluorescent lighting, a security camera records footage of the room, which is then live-streamed to a website where the viewer is encased digitally in a square box, unable to escape. Subtle sensory triggers such as the coldness and rigidity of the surface, fragrant notes of bleach and disinfectant, and the crisp sounds of ceramic tiles. Emotions and memories stick to bodies through repeated contact; these impressions shape how individuals orient space (Ahmed 2006). In HOLDING ROOM, surfaces do not communicate transparently, but distort perception by way of minimalistic opacity. It is an affective strategy to resist the expectation that racialised trauma must be made legible through visibility, narrative, or catharsis. Rather than offering clarity, the installation insists upon opacity, creating a sensory encounter that bypasses the need for verbal explanation or cultural translation. The sterile materials and clinical atmosphere generate discomfort without requiring me to perform vulnerability or provide context for consumption. This allows viewers to experience disorientation directly rather than through mediated narratives, shifting the power dynamic from “artist as confessor” to “viewer as participant”.
Rather than relying on visual cues and symbolic representation, the work embraces nuance and emptiness, or what Quah Ee Ling and Shawna Tang (2019) call “entangled opacity”. Visibility becomes a form of violence by introducing misrecognition and co-optation into a dominant culture, and visibility becomes surveillance. Vulnerability becomes voyeurism, like when speaking openly about trauma. HOLDING ROOM serves as an act of resistance by refusing explanation through materiality and spatial emptiness. Underfoot, the untacked tiles encourage cautious, tentative steps, like tiptoeing through an unstable landscape. On the walls, harsh fluorescent fixtures bathe the space in a clinical glare, examining the viewers as they navigate the space. Meanwhile, a security camera observes and records each movement without invitation. The unblinking lens turns the act of witnessing and engagement into vulnerability and belittling. The layers in this room, the elements of a precarious floor, an interrogatory light, and an unsolicited gaze, deconstruct the experience of the vacuum and the feeling of disciplining the body and perception left by institutional environments, by controlling discomfort and distilling it down to the five senses.
HOLDING ROOM echoes the sculptural creations of Jes Fan, a Hong Kong artist who explores body autonomy and trans-identity by deconstructing the human body into its most simple forms – melanin, estrogen, testosterone – extracted from the artist and encased into glass-blown vessels, thereby embodying the ambiguous nature of both migrant identities and gender-fluid identities (Pavel 2021). Like Fan, I deconstruct this gap into a sensory experience rather than just a visual experience. In the early stages of developing HOLDING ROOM, I was adamant that the installation should avert visual stimulation. Rather than relying on visual and narrative cues, I wanted the work to be felt, to invoke a sensory and emotional response that mirrors what I feel – all the disorientation, discomfort, misrecognition. This is not merely a guide to my own story, but an immersive experience that guides the viewer towards a state of being.
Tether Bodies, Paradise of Self
This tension between refusal and desire, between protective opacity and longing recognition, manifests in many forms throughout my practice. PärÅdißé (2024) is an experimental collection of small-scale works that attempts to materialise the emotional and existential conditions experienced by diasporic individuals – suspended through place, identities, and futures – through methods of photography, printmaking, 3D printing, and installation. The work is anchored in a utopian idea of the self as paradise: dreaming of coherence, alignment, and liberation – in sight but always out of reach under pressures of assimilation and survival. For me, the paradise of the self relates to the coming together of the masculine and feminine, finding solace in my own body and belonging in both place and body.
This body of work acts as a continuation of my inquiry into gender identity and its fragmentations, following my earlier projects such as BODYSNATCH (2024), which explored moments of heightened femininity, and BODYHUNT (2024), my pursuit of masculine presentation. These projects resist linear or fixed gender narratives, instead positioning identity as a shifting condition, gestures and identifications tied to multiple cultural and gender codes.
Rather than offering a cohesive narrative or resolution, PärÅdißé presents fragments: objects and images that occupy non-traditional placements, disjoined in space but echoing other fragmented experiences of diasporic identity. In this way, this work aligns with José Esteban Muñoz’s theorisation of queer futurity as a “then and there” rather than a “here and now” – a becoming instead of an arrival (Muñoz 2009). PärÅdißé includes a series of portraits created in collaboration with members of my community, in which I stamped fabricated passport-styled emblems of a fictionalised paradise directly onto their bodies (Figure 2). Faces blurred, not to anonymise, but to reference the dehumanisation and bureaucratic flattening of migrant documents, numbers and data which is abstracted from the emotional, social, and cultural conditions from which they emerge. This critique of how border regimes flatten migrant identities comes from Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Here, I consider how the state “renders migrants legible” by transforming lived realities into data points of governance: visa status, biometric data and ID cards (Walia 2013:87). This reduction stretches beyond the border itself, structuring migrants’ daily lives, rights, and visibility. By staging portraits that echo this logic of flattening and simultaneously reimagining them through blurred faces and utopic emblems, the work dismantles and disrupts the violence of bureaucratic legibility.
The visual tone of this project was also heavily influenced by queer Chinese photographer Ren Hang, whose intimate photography offers a pointed yet nuanced insight into the body politics and autonomy of queer Chinese individuals. His sentiments of showing the body as it is, along with the intuitive approach to photography, guided this project in depicting bodies on their own terms, without demanding legibility for a Western gaze (Hang 2016).
In both HOLDING ROOM and PärÅdißé, I utilise my practice to stage a quiet resistance to linear narratives and understandings of identity and belonging. Working through affective materiality, spatial discomfort, and fragmented visual language, I construct installations and imagery that do not seek resolution but rather create a holding space for tension, opacity, and misalignment. All this is fuelled by my lived experience as a queer, racialised individual who has tried time and time again to justify my identity and way of life, to translate myself between East and West, between feminine and masculine, between softness and aggression. Belonging never comes without assimilation – without loss.
Drawing on the theories of José Esteban Muñoz, Sara Ahmed, David Eng and Shinhee Han and others, my work offers not a narrative but a condition. I seek understanding and mutual experience over condolence and resolution. In HOLDING ROOM, the stark spatial composition and sensory unease resist the demands of visibility and confession that come with the weight of institutional whiteness and migrant alienation. In PärÅdißé, the fantasy of a utopian self becomes both a survival strategy and a critique of border regimes and identity flattening. Ultimately, my work creates a space where dissonance, misrecognition and longing can be held – seen not as a failure in need of resolution, but a new possibility where multiplicities exist simultaneously. Validating these experiences, I contribute to the broader conversation around queer diasporic experience, institutional critique, and the body politics of rendering, recognising, and remembering.
Reference List
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