"I am not cute and I don't want to be," says Chia-Hui Gao Swift, Taiwanese artist and Film maker. She is lying on her back in her bedroom where we are having our interview. Even though she's known (marginally) for her sexy subject matter there is nothing untoward going on. Gao is on her back for strictly chiropractic reasons -she pulled a muscle- and we are in her bedroom because that's where her video equipment is kept.
Stretched out on the wood floor Gao cheerfully rattles off projects she has done on film and video. The titles are titillating. "Lips", "Lust" and "Please Excuse my Desire" were all video shorts she did as a student completing her MFA at Tufts University. If the titles are bold it's no doubt because the woman who created them is bold too. Gao is not the type of shrinking violet that some people expect when they think of young Taiwanese women. Instead she is a sturdy, smiling, fast-talking go-getter whose favorite subjects are sex, desire, gender and violence.
Gao's work is as just as sensual as her videos' titles suggest. In "Lust" a pair of female hands holds an overripe pear, turning the nearly rotten piece of fruit, closely examining its bruises and mold. Then, tortuously slowly, the fruit's skin is broken and the gelatinous brown pulp of the pear is plundered by a thumb. Squishy sounds come out of the television speakers.
High Hopes
With only a handful of these types of shorts to her name Gao is one of the thousands of struggling unknown film directors in New York City, simultaneously trying to hone her vision and find an audience for it. She lives with her husband in the far North West reaches of Manhattan's Washington Heights, an area she laughingly calls "Siberia." Gao has high hopes that one day she will make a feature film, for which she has already written the script. Called "Sue-Ling", the script is a drama about child sexual abuse and sexual harrassment.
In "Sue-Ling" a young Taiwanese woman leaves a cheating husband to make a fresh start in New York only to encounter sexual harassment in her new job. In the script Sue-ling's caucasian boss preys exclusively on young Asian women, taking advantage of their insecure immigrant status. Her ordeal with her boss forces her to deal with disturbing memories of a sexually abusive father. Gao says her work was inspired by the society of repression she grew up in and by her own experiences working for a lecherous older man when she first came to New York.
"All the men in the script are bad," concedes Gao. But for Sue-ling "the real enemy is herself."
Gao says that her character's fear and timidity make her more of a victim than she should be. In the end it is by confronting her own demons and insecurities, rather than changing other people, that Sue-ling finds peace. But not all of Gao's projects deliver such a moral of self-reliance. She would like society to change too.
Erotic Power
The attitude of Gao's short video piece "Please Excuse My Desire" is defiant and celebratory, a challenge to the demure stereotypes assigned to Asian women. The ideal audience for this short, she says, is Taiwanese men. She would like to shake up their ideas of how a woman should behave. Because she was a tomboy who talked a lot and wasn't interested in learning to cook but instead in learning to drive she felt stifled growing up in Taiwan.
"I felt so limited and suppressed in Taiwan," Gao says. "Male friends didn't treat me as equal. I didn't feel free. They failed to see the real me."
Gao's political use of her own sexuality to assert her independence makes for a complicated and easily misunderstood message. Those who see women in sexy dresses as "asking for trouble" will have trouble appreciating the liberating power of "Please Excuse My Desire". This short video shows nothing pornographic but is highly erotically charged. Black feminist poet and critic Audre Lorde wrote about this kind of approach in her book "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power."
"When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women," wrote Lorde. "of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives."
Drawn to the Edge
Gao's two most recent pieces have been something of a departure from the subject of female sexuality. "David" and "Ah Leon", two short films Gao shot recently in New York both focus on male homosexuality. In "David" an anonymous tryst between two men ends in violence. "Ah Leon" is a strange and poetic portrait of a Taiwanese transvestite. Gao's exploration of homosexuality, like her films about feminine eroticism, unveil what is hidden or suppressed in society.
"I am drawn to people who live on the edge," says Gao. "Lesbians, gays, people who live in the dark."
"Ah Leon" is available for viewing in ifilm.com, a site that has given Gao an audience of 1,000 people from around the world. While she has shown her work at a few small film festivals her greatest challenge will be to expand her audience and to convince more established Film makers to take a risk and invest in her projects.
"About all the odds are stacked against her," says Jane Hudson, a Professor of Video and Graduate Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, an affiliate institution of Tufts University. Hudson taught Chia-hui video and art theory when she was studying for her MFA. "A, she's a woman. B, she doesn't have a major narrative behind her and then, in terms of getting anything seen apart from on the festival circuit, and I don't mean Sundance, it's very difficult. The more she can get into mainstream subject matter like romance or something like that the more options she'll have. But, if anybody can do it she can."
Related Links:
exoticize this!
south asian + a.p.i. american feminist resources
One Woman's Take on "Rice Lovers", aka Asiaphiles, or Oriental Fetishists
AsianGurls.com, a website and community for all women of Asian heritage
An Interview with Sabrina Margarita Sandata, editor of the zine "Bamboo Girl"
"Through Chinese Women's Eyes"
The Making of a Documentary Video in China
