Paradise
Holds Itself
Shut

July 15 — September 9, 2023

GOES TO OCEAN
Los Angeles, California

Documentation by TJ Shin
Supported by Canada Council for the Arts

Paradise Holds Itself Shut considers the construction and regulation of Asiatic womanhood as a set of categories constellated by wartime sexual economies/state-and-military-sanctioned sex trafficking, immigration policy, and the institution of marriage. The overarching logic of racialized sexual violence which facilitates (and eventually obfuscates itself within) projects of neo/colonialism and imperialism, also populates Western cultural imagination with its libidinal excess – psychosexual fantasies, reproductive anxieties, and sadomasochistic principles.

In a series of hand-stitched textile collages, the visual economies of pop cultural abjection, war photography, and pornography converge in a melange of digitally deep-fried grotesquerie. Archetypes emerge – the soldierly, the maternal, and the maimed among them; these clusters of figures share in the discursive codification of injury and provide an index for spectatorial sympathies bound by narcissistic and erotic tensions. The syntax of Sentimentalism haunts each work as an uneasy specter; though the narrative musculature of rescue, romance, and punishment is invoked, the legitimacy of these positions is eroded through temporal and spatial collapse.

Distorted visages collide against crisp portraiture; encounters between the named, unnamed, and unavenged are reconfigured as poly-satin intimacies puckering at the edges. The stakeholders and commodities, indebted and debt-collectors produced by regimes of violence are crystallized as a register of visual pleasure, one which makes legible the erotic viscera enfolding the pageantry of war and conquest. It is not a politics of pity which embeds itself within the exhibited works, but the question of how various modes of capture and containment have naturalized apparatuses of extraction, dispossession, and liquidation through the deployment of a paradoxical subject – one who is always-consenting, yet produces endless jouissance in her performed violation.