Quỳnh Lâm at Rituals and Rebirths

2 Aug

Peruke Projects and A.I. Gallery
By Jordan Chan

This is a winning entry from the third Art & Market ‘Fresh Take’ writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.

When the gong is struck, those among the audience who agreed to participate will begin reading one by one, the string of prose provided by Quỳnh Lâm. The gallery coordinator instructed before the performance began.

Crinkled clothes, multicoloured banknotes and sanitary pads cluttered the floor as Lâm, unable to conceal her distress, guts her luggage, unpacking anarchically. Her dishevelled self begs for help as her knees chewed away at the cold wooden floors, perusing through her pile of belongings for a silver pair of scissors. Heedlessly as it may, the handling of her personal items indicated a detachment from the personal.

Upon finding her silver, she sits quietly on a mat, legs resting over one another, adjacent to her slouched figure who wore a subtle malaise with thoughts I could not read. The gong finally wrings out the silence from the room, beginning the spoken word procession. Lâm’s shadow casting a gentle veil over her long black ponytail, black on black as her head glooms over her knees. What I could read was within the palm of my hands, a slip of paper...

Your name is too difficult to pronounce, I shall just call you Gwen.

Another read…

Real racism does not exist.

I am sure you understand where this is going.

And I read aloud, into the mic, as instructed, slightly crutching my words as the fervent red flag wavers in my mind breathlessly. Nervous glances were exchanged as one by one the audience continued reading the string of “memoirs” provided by Lam. The entire space unfolds itself for us to peer into the past years of Lam’s endeavours, of all the countless alterations she was thrown into, verbal fist fights that leave any capitulated. Those words which left her mind screaming out loud, left this room in silence.

Quỳnh Lâm, ‘The Price of Humanity’ performed by Quỳnh Lâm and sponsored by Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and A.I. Gallery London.

With that, the artist holds the room in a chokehold. Unsparingly, she adds to the edge of our seats by tying her hair in a long ponytail, the silver now free from its case. Lâm tilts her head slightly, and begins snipping away slowly at the thick black knot.

Performance art is inherently political, with the body being a means of criticising social and environmental issues. But the crux of Lâm’s performance lay not only in protest. It was also an invitation for audiences to grieve with her. As Lam performed during London Gallery Week, it is difficult not to read her work as a polemic. Taking place in South Kensington, an area historically white but in recent decades home to many Asian minorities, Lam contributed to dialogues surrounding Asian hate.

Through the use of language, her performance reminded audiences of their complicity with the socio-political issues that have arisen during the pandemic. However, amidst the spoken words that flooded the gallery with “memoirs” of Asian hate, Lâm chose to remain silent the entire performance. The artist’s choice here to unfold a politically charged narrative quietly does not embrace rebellion but rather seeks to invite empathy. She assures in a later conversation via email...

I never intended this work to be an indictment. Rather, I wanted to reproduce a set of experiences, snippets of alienation and otherness of being a foreigner mixed with the loneliness and weariness of being a COVID “refugee”.

It is important to note the addition of Anida Yoeu Ali’s work which further defined the nature of this exhibition. Ali’s ‘The Red Chador’, a glimmering figure over six feet tall in all its sequins, stood silently opposite Lâm’s performance. Together the two works antagonised, discreetly disrupting the four white walls of Cromwell Place, Ali’s work stationary throughout the entirely of Lâm’s dynamic performance. Both artists here displayed a political candour that dominates the exhibition’s putative curatorial direction. Which swiftly brings me to a point I feel needs raising, that whilst ‘Rituals and Rebirths’ mark Peruke Projects and A.I. Gallery’s curatorial efforts in championing emerging and underrepresented artists, I find it difficult to ignore a shoehorned optimism resulting from the inclusion of ‘Today is Your’, a performance by artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, the third and final artist participating in the exhibition. Through the use of language, her performance reminded audiences of their complicity with the socio-political issues that have arisen during the pandemic. However, amidst the spoken words that flooded the gallery with “memoirs” of Asian hate, Lâm chose to remain silent the entire performance.

“Through the use of language, her performance reminded audiences of their complicity with the socio-political issues that have arisen during the pandemic. However, amidst the spoken words that flooded the gallery with “memoirs” of Asian hate, Lâm chose to remain silent the entire performance. ”

In Rasmussen’s performance that preceded Lâm’s, taking place earlier in the morning where she distributed to the surrounding public, lemons with and I quote, “open-ended fragments of sentences with affirming output”. Rasmussen’s employment of language here I argue to be a step back in the direction embarked by the exhibition. To no discredit towards Rasmussen whose practice sat appropriately within the title of ‘Rituals and Rebirths’. However, to have positioned her alongside Lâm and Ali whose works titled ‘The Price of Humanity’ and ‘The Red Chador’, sat incongruous to the politically charged, linguistic candour that is thematic throughout the exhibition. In this context, I find solace with Barthes, who as Maggie Nelson describes, “absurd...to try to flee from language’s assertive nature by” what Barthes understands as “add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.” Why dilute the efforts of both artists and the exhibition with Rasmussen’s ambiguity and an emphasis on ‘Rebirth’, rescinding towards a fear of assertion and specificity, away from the critical environment established by Lâm and Ali?

I left Cromwell Place with a reminder from Lâm that Southeast Asian performance art carries an important quality that is often overlooked — recognising the presence and stakes of the work. Through the collaboration between Peruke Projects and A.I. Gallery, who also understood the value of audience, aided the means in which Lâm’s performance was able to resist the repetition of espousing representation and recognition, especially in the production of narratives surrounding Southeast Asian diaspora, and all its subjectivities and sensibilities. The stakes of her performance were thus met by an important audience, composed not only of curious art enthusiasts (and frequenters), but like-minded artists, curators, tutors, writers and directors who will be critical in repositioning the work and exhibition as a site of knowledge production.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M or the prize sponsors.

About the Writer

Jordan Chan is an artist and writer. His creative practice engages with Southeast Asian art. With a specific interest in diaspora, he seeks to challenge cliches and barriers between art and local communities.