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I didn’t want to write about Reagan Louie’s
Sex Work in Asia, an exhibit of photographs of Asian female
sex workers on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until
December 7th (Pearl Harbor Day!). I didn’t want to dignify
it with a response. But it raised so many tangled and relentlessly
pesky issues that I had to write something down just to give myself
some peace.
1. Reception
First of all, it must be noted that this topic has been done to
death. From specialty fetish porn to educational documentaries,
the image of the Asian woman as sex object has been celebrated,
censored, x-rayed, dissected and served up ten dozen different ways.
Do we really need to see one more instance, whether titillating
or critical, of the objectification and commodification of Asian
female bodies?
Apparently, we do. Although we may have experienced
the same frisson of excitement or guilt in any number of
permutations, we never seem to tire of this exotic/erotic combination.
And indeed, the museum visitors are more interesting than the images
on the walls. The last time I saw so many solitary men at a cultural
event was at a screening of Das Boot. A group of white
women huddled in a corner, quietly shaking their heads and murmuring,
"It's so sad, so sad." One of the entries in the comment
book (which was completely full) bluntly stated, "Thanks for
getting me off." Another at the opposite end of the spectrum
accused Louie of exploiting Asian women and all but assaulting the
viewer (an Asian woman herself – not me). One Asian man entering
the gallery with a white woman on his arm was struck dumb, gazing
slack-jawed at the panoramas of Asian women on display, while his
companion giggled nervously. I imagine a lot of interesting cross-identification
going on in that moment: perhaps the heterosexual Asian man identifies
with the Asian-ness of the women in the images, at the same time
that they are objectified by his desire. The white woman’s
discomfiture might come from an opposite identification: as a woman,
she recognizes that she shares something with the women in the images,
but their objectification is kept safely at bay by the comfortable
cushion of racism.
Of course these speculations beg the question: does
the work objectify its subjects? The interesting thing about Louie’s
work is that it attempts to walk the line between eros and pathos,
evoking a range of mixed feelings: titillation, curiosity, shock
(yes, still) and pity. Louie further complicates this mix by stating
that he intends to record the specificity of the women’s lives,
a goal that seems more sympathetic and humanizing than objectifying.
Perhaps their images are meant not just to make us feel something,
but to make us acknowledge the women’s own capacity to feel.
And indeed a few of the photos reflect an inkling of individual
personality and warmth – two women giggling together, or a
lone woman caught in a pensive, solitary moment. But I’m not
sure that the exhibit as a whole succeeds in this endeavor. The
majority of the photographs lean too readily towards either the
erotic or the anthropological. Overwhelmed by the weight of the
attendant responses – arousal and pity –“specificity”
doesn’t stand a chance.
As an Asian American woman, I wanted to be bored,
jaded, and stone-cold in the face of these clichés. Instead,
I found myself feeling disturbed, and angered. Disturbed because
I felt strangely vulnerable in that gallery, as if all the solitary
men were looking at me, then looking at the photos of people who
look like me, and making a visual equation. Is that how people see
me? Am I ashamed for the women in the pictures? No, but I am ashamed
to admit that on some level, even to myself, Asian women are still
all the same.
I was angry because some of the images are no different
from what you might find in a Special Asian Issue of Penthouse:
naked, or nearly naked women, reclining languidly on beds, tables
and bathtubs, gazing seductively into the camera. And then there
are the hair photos. As a marker of both racial and sexual difference,
hair is by far the most over-fetishized part of the Asian female
body. Unlike the portraits, which are titled with the woman’s
first name, these photos have titles like “Masseuse”
or “Black Hair.” I hoped to read them as some kind of
critique of the trope of Asian women's hair as exotic/erotic symbol,
but no matter what angle I tried, they just kept saying, “hair.”
One-note images like these belie Louie’s professed intention
to record the “specificity” of the women he photographs,
in effect, reducing them once again to empty symbols.
2. Intention
Louie also claims that his photos are collaborations with his subjects.
He states that the women posed themselves, and that he paid them
for their time (if not for their usual services). This collaboration
in itself disrupts the traditional relationship between photographer/artist
and model. Instead of posing his “models” according
to his whim or inspiration, Louie lets them determine how they will
present themselves to the camera/him. In that sense, he implies,
they are not really models (since the very word “model”
connotes some kind of embodied ideal), but subjects, possessed of
their own personality and the will to express it.
What his work cannot escape, however, is the maleness
of his gaze. Contrary to his claims of collaboration, Louie’s
work exposes the similarity between artist and john. The women pose
for him, a paying customer. Many of the women “choose”
to present themselves in a way that clearly addresses a male viewer,
a viewer who is interested in nothing more than their functional
identity as sex workers. While this is a potentially empowering
and intoxicating position for a typically emasculated Asian American
man – to be the focus of a willing woman’s attentions
– it's also an inherently transactional/commercial one, fraught
with imbalances between male and female, sexual or otherwise. In
a situation where their very bodies are for sale, can the women
be said to really choose how they present themselves? In that context,
presentation is more likely a function of economics than personality.
Of course we can’t assume that sex workers are all victims
of circumstance, but we also can’t ignore the immense reach
of the power differentials that create the kind of interaction that
Louie seeks in the first place: male/female, U.S./Asia, customer/sex
worker.
Louie freely admits that his project is as much about
exploring his own identity as it is a documentary or sociological
endeavor. In fact, he disavows all interest in sociology, a neat
way of side-stepping other problems of subjectivity, perception
and representation inherent in sociological/ethnographic projects.
By claiming that he is not interested in a sociological point of
view, Louie tries to avoid turning the subjects of his photographs
into mute objects of study, mere illustrations of this or that theory
of the economy of sex in Asia.
His intent to portray the specificity and personality
of these women reminds me of the powerful work of photographer Dawoud
Bey, whose large-scale portraits of American youth give his
sitters a majesty and dignity they seldom receive either in mainstream
imagery or in their own imaginations. I think Louie wants to give
these women something of that respect – not to idealize them,
but to show them as people, as individuals, in the particularities
of their everyday lives. But his work lacks the generosity of spirit
that informs Bey’s work, and I think his good intentions get
mired in his own ambivalence: is he a sympathetic portraitist intent
on portraying these women with a sense of dignity and humanity?
Or is he just another john using them to shore up his own sexuality
against the ravages of racism? Why are there only two choices?
In the most generous reading, Louie’s work might
open up a third choice, a new position from which to speak about
this complex issue. That his work is instead thoroughly bound up
with his own heterosexual desires is evident in the fact that although
the exhibit is entitled generically “Sex Work in Asia,”
all of the images are of women workers. The only men that appear
in the pictures are anonymous (and sometimes faceless) johns. And
Louie himself never enters the frame. Although he has avoided turning
the women into sociological examples, he has instead made them ciphers,
or worse, souvenirs of his exploratory journey into his own identity.
3. Representation
It’s not just their subject matter that makes the photographs
in Sex Work in Asia reminiscent of a Larry Flynt publication.
Louie has photographed these women with a remarkable uniformity
of color and light, despite the wide variety of settings and backdrops
he must have encountered. The colors are saturated, flat and often
bubble-gum bright; the clarity and starkness of the images is striking.
Nothing is obscured or romanticized, nothing left to the imagination.
The images’ scale adds to their commercial feel: they are
poster size, hung close together in continuous bands around the
galleries, like a filmstrip. The effect is cinematic, and a bit
overwhelming, a panorama of Asian sex workers in various stages
of dress from silk suits to birthday suits, interspersed with “atmospheric”
shots of sinister halls, stairs and doorways.
Louie is clearly playing with the conventions of artistic
representation and commercial pornographic photography, although
again, the result is less than clear. Are the format and scale of
the photos meant to make the images seem more immediate and real?
Or more sensational and garish? They fall somewhere between documentary
accuracy, commercial gloss, and portraiture’s aggrandizing
impulse. The end result is that Asian female sex workers inhabit
some nether region between the abjection they represent, the fantasy
they sell, and the real, live, thinking and feeling women that they
must be. In that sense they are completely unknowable: they are
what we perceive them to be.
4. Reflection
It’s difficult to view an exhibit entitled Sex Work in
Asia without wondering what it’s trying to say about
sex work in Asia. It’s even more difficult to view a roomful
of portraits of women whom we know are Asian sex workers without
wondering what the work is trying to say about them. The exhibit
ends up provoking much thought, but saying very little. From one
perspective, it’s one man’s subjective record of a journey
through the brothels, bars and sex clubs of Asia. From another,
it’s titillating, exploitative art that justifies its canonization
by paying lip service to the power imbalances inherent in such representations.
From a third, it’s an investigation into the act of representation
itself and its relation to identity formation. And from a fourth
perspective, it’s an attempt to create real, human images
of Asian sex workers.
Highly ambivalent and smugly indeterminate, Sex
Work in Asia certainly respects its viewer, allowing for multiple,
open-ended interpretations. Too bad it fails to extend the same
respect to its subjects. The whole project is self-indulgent, especially
for work dealing with such flammable material. By combining his
personal quest for identity with a topic more commonly addressed
in fetish pornography or didactic educational tracts, Louie is either
taking a step forward towards a new understanding of race, sex and
subjectivity, or a step back towards our modernist forebears’
notions of exoticism and otherness as sites of self-reinvention.
In the end, though, the work stands absolutely still, straddling
these two contradictory impulses, and fretting over whether it wants
to maintain the status quo or shyly subvert it.
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