Liang Yaya

Keep being in danger, 2019, drawing on PVC, white clay, chain, terracotta, flower, acrylic on canvas

Safe and danger, it’s a story based on community and outcasts, and on the feeling of alienation that one can experience both externally and internally, as a stranger in the UK. A portrait of a black monster looming in a pink mirror, a portrait of a pink long-tongued animal tamed by a giant, two non-human animals staring at each other in space. In Western folklore, monsters often undergo processes of bodily manipulation in which they are torn apart and stitched together into Frankensteinian forms. Estranged, dispossessed, misunderstood, and feared — they are eternally othered, in other words, they are queer.

Animality Matter is an ongoing research about exploring the means by which non-human animal figures, in their epistemological duties as "third terms" frequently also serve as zones of attraction for racial, sexual, or abled otherness.

And the thought of applying eastern animal’s mythology is from the desire to start a conversation without appropriating western/white gaze, and address this experience of being an outsider which actually is an insider before using the language and collective memory of a certain kind of folklore with a common understanding. My intention of applying is to provide alternative perspectives through the lens of the other: the monster, the pet, the partner; an alternative perspective that is apart from the conventional viewpoint that otherness and stigmatization.

Cinderella's Dick, 2019, nails, green wig, hookah, clay, drawing on paper

Like many other Western iconic tale from my childhood, Cinderella has an embedded magic change of “outsider” whoever ever is not considered rich, beauty, clean, and healthy. Because of this magic whatever it is voluntary or artificial, the protagonist is finally becoming an “insider” and living with her prince forever. In many counties, Cinderella is the pinnacle of happy love story. Everyone who have a dream of perfect love wants to put on the glass slipper. But someone who stand outside of the heteronormative can’t squeeze their feet into the glass slipper. Immigrants, people of color, laborers, and working-class subjects, women, queer subjects, disabled people which are normative dismissals, might be likened to cut their feet like cinderella’s sisters. In this level, every cinderella’s “dicks” have been disappeared.

The Metamorphosis is a part of the ongoing project: Animality Matter. It is Gregor Samsa that is destroyed by his family step by step after finding himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect. Narratively, this insect is the other who make connection with human; visually, it is a complex blend of species, race, gender, and sexuality, which animates a body without organs. In Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915), the presence of this “non-human” insect can serve as a key that invite me to consider the cross-discursive connections already available and drawn between animals and humans, racial castration and biopolitics neutering and spaying.