Lately I've become obsessed with the idea that you can write your own history (instead of waiting around for the powers-that-be to decide what "history" is). I rembered my friend Sen telling me they participated in something called the Queer Ancestors Project, so called them up and asked them a bunch of questions about it!
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity:
Alicia Willett: In 2019 you were part of a printmaking workshop called The Queer Ancestors Project, where you discovered your own Queer ancestors and made artwork that told the story of them and of you. How did you become involved?
Sen Lu: I think I found the Queer Ancestors Project from an ad on Instagram, and it was billed as a free linocut workshop for Queer people aged 18-26 with any range of experience in linocut printing. I’ve always had some level of impostor syndrome around the idea of doing art, because I think the way I was raised was very anti-pursuing-art-as-a-career and also anti-hobby. It allowed me to put everything into what I was working on and really invest in it because there was a goal [(the closing reception)] and then afterwards start divesting from having goals in my art practice.
AW: What was being in the program like?
SL: We had some structure and some freedom. We had to make four prints. For the first print we had to just pick a queer ancestor, and we also had a visit to the GLBT archives which are super fucking cool!
SL: I started out wanting to look into Queer Asian history, because I don’t really know much about Asian American history, let alone Queer Asian American history, and I think I had a lot of assumptions based on my experiences growing up: that Asian American activism was all like, shitty assimilationist politics, since the suburb that I grew up in was very much like “Chinese Americans Against Affirmative Action” type activism. Being in the Bay Area I’m starting to realize that there’s a really really deep history of radical Asian American Activism and radical Queer Asian American Activism that I was really close to.
AW: The Queer Ancestors Project has an online gallery featuring work from participants over the years. It’s so clear that each artist has a story to tell and a unique way of using linocut to do that. Could I ask you talk about the prints you made?
SL: [“Phoenix Rising”] was the first print I ever did, and it was also the first time I’d done art in like, forever. I really wanted to do Asian imagery, and I think it was my first time incorporating Asian imagery into any artwork I was doing. One thing I wanted to do in that piece was [play with] the fenghuang (phoenix) and the dragon pairing. They are a really traditional heterosexual Chinese pairing, like yin and yang, or the emperor and the empress, man and wife. There’s some implication that the phoenix is pure and delicate and the dragon is strong and can attack, and in having two phoenixes as a pair instead I really wanted them to be interdependent, like, I didn’t want there to be a power dynamic. The way I portrayed them I wanted them to be both attacking an unseen opponent and both defending each other. I think that represents the kind of “For Us, By Us” [attitude] I’d like to see in our community.
AW: What was it like meeting your Queer Ancestors?
SL: I got to meet two elders in person, one was Giselle Cohan, and she was one of the co-founders of Phoenix Rising, which was the first Asian American Lesbian newsletter in the United States, and it was basically a publication they’d send out monthly for several years. It had picnics, or like news about a gathering in the forest a bunch of Asian Queers did one weekend, and fundraisers and personals. It was super interesting because she works in tech [like me, and] the way she talks about herself she makes it seem like she has a pretty quiet life, despite [her involvement being] so seminal and so historical. [It] allowed me to unpack some of the guilt that I had about being here and being in tech and just the things that I was navigating. And then I also got meet Kitty Tsui, although we didn’t actually get to talk.
AW: You honor Kitty Tsui eith a print as well. It’s a really powerful image, with bold square lines framing the powerful contours and textures of Tsui’s athletic body — a body that is literally busting out of the frame.
In your artist’s statement you reference Tsui in 1996, “Growing up in Hong Kong, I heard all around me mothers yelling at their children: ‘Say nui, mo no, mo yung!’ Dead girl, no brain, no use… For me as an Asian/Pacific lesbian, silence is not an option. To ensure that we…be acknowledged as who we are. Women with a history…Women who survived being dead girls.” (“Asian Pacific Lesbian a.k.a Dead Girl, China Doll, Dragon Lady, or the Invisible Man”).
What do you think it means to be a “dead girl”? I’ve never heard that phrase before.
SL: I’d never actually heard it before either. I think the way Kitty was talking about it was probably talking about pretty misogynistic culture, and I think in that sense Chinese culture is very misogynistic.
I just found it in this Cantonese dictionary. There’s this term “bad girl,” like in the way you might say to you cat “You’re being a bad girl!” It’s an abusive term for a bad girl, and the characters in it are literally like “dead” “daughter” or “dead” “woman”.
The other day my mom sent me this photo of an old Chinese scroll that had like two poems and I asked her to translate them for me and she said the first poem is about raising a daughter and how your daughter is the most delicate flower that you spend all your days watering and it grows so beautiful and slender and delicate as possible, and one day a man comes and plucks it with no thanks to you! And then the second half is about raising a son, like raising a son is like opening a bank account that you deposit all your money into, and then one day this woman comes and just takes the whole bank account without any gratitude. And I’m like, ‘This is like so awful, why would you send me this??’ So I think there’s all this history of the one child policy and how there aren’t enough girls because everyone only wanted men, because they keep the family line going, etc. etc., and women aren’t necessarily supposed to be out there having their own opinions. It’s very confusing, I don’t really get it. But I think maybe that’s partially what it’s about.
AW: It also reminds me of the slogan from the AIDS crisis “Silence = Death”. Like if silence will kill you, speaking your truth might make you more alive.
SL: I like that a lot. That reminds be a little bit of this Junot Diaz’s quote:
“…if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”
AW: I think my favorite work from this series is your self portrait. It just gives off this intense aura of inner strength.
SL: It’s styled after these paintings [called thanka paintings] that are hung throughout my aunt and grandmother’s homes that are from the Tibetan buddhist tradition.usually portraying the Buddha near a place that you would pray, to help you think about all the Buddha-like qualities and aspire to embody them in yourself. I added an eastern-style dragon that was wrapped around the halo, which also looks like a bubble or a protective circle. I wanted to make it unclear whether the dragon was protecting me or trying to harm me, to symbolize my relationship with my feelings. I was in a place in my life where I was realizing, despite thinking that I took time to feel my feelings every day, in retrospect I was actually pretty dissociated from them. My partner had mentioned that it would take me a long time to process my feelings, or I wouldn’t be even aware that I was feeling certain ways, like angry or defensive, [or] reacting in a triggered way. I had this sort of fantasy of myself as a person who was completely aware of my feelings and in control. And so it was also about that journey and trying to unpack my relationship with them.
And then part of it was I think me trying to get more comfortable with my body, which is why I did a nude self portrait. I definitely have and continue to have a lot of internalized fat-phobia and I think it’s something I really want to work on.
AW: Are you saying you are your own ancestor in a way, that you’re your own God?
SL: Something we talked about a lot during the workshop was “Who are your Queer Ancestors?” I think the notion of family has always been a really difficult one for me because I don’t feel like I have “Family’ in the way that maybe the Western tradition conditions you to think about what family should mean. And I think in terms of Queer role models, my elders and role models are mainly just my friends.
I don’t really have my own gods. My own spirituality is very made-up and very personalized to me. I draw from a lot of different influences. There’s no one person or people that I am able to pattern-match when it comes to what I want out of my life. I think a lot of the people my parents would like me to think of as role models are really antithetical to the things that I want. I don’t really have professional mentors, or people that I admire who are in a mentorship position.
I think there’s an aspect of loneliness to it too that I’m really only reflecting on now.
AW: How was the closing reception?
SL: It felt really good. It was such a trip. It was really packed, and it was really interesting to have people come up to me and say ”Wow, your art made me think about these things,” which was really sweet. Katie [Gilmartin, printmaker and creator of the Queer Ancestors Program] said one of her favorite parts about being the featured artist is you can talk to anyone you want at the entire event, and you’ll always have an excuse to do so, and I loved that, it’s so true. And as somebody who likes being able to meet people and not having to deal with social pressures or cues it was great to be able to show up at this thing, dress however the fuck I want. It was my first time really being in “the art world” and knowing without the shadow of a doubt that I could take up as much space as I wanted, and that made a lot of sense in the room.
AW: That’s so inspirational. I think there are definitely lessons in there that I’m trying to learn… Do you think you found what you were looking for here?
SL: Yeah, I think so! Maybe instead of feeling less like an impostor I feel I care less about the idea that there are rules or that there’s an institution I’m trying to break into. Right now I’m in a place where I’m trying to figure out what comes next!
References
- "Queer Ancestors Project." https://www.queerancestorsproject.org/
- "Kitty Tsui, 2016 Phoenix Award Honoree." https://apiqwtc.org/phoenix-award-honoree/2016-kitty-tsui/
