Soft Heroes 2017-2024

‘the silence of a boy is hard to endure
but endure mine, i beg you’
Dennis Cooper, The Weaklings (XL), 2013

In their extreme blankness, Liu Le Lann’s figures perhaps most resemble the unlocatable love objects of Dennis Cooper’s fiction. Because the boys Cooper obsesses over lack any discernible characteristics, and refuse to express themselves, they demand to be represented. Someone else has to describe them if they cannot do it themselves. But by refusing to affirm or deny their representation, or display even the most meagre qualities attributed to them, they mark up the distance between reality and representation. The processes of identification and representation continue whether or not there is something to be described. Identity, and the subject, are shown to be little more than narrative fantasy or social construction. This is not some subversive power wielded by the dissident individual – a passive agency, whatever that would mean – but simply making visible an already existing fault line in the process of identification. In showing that representation comes from the outside, at a cultural rather than individual level, Cooper’s blank characters, like Liu Le Lann’s almost formless figures, cannot be reduced to a type, a racial category, or otherwise defined. The silence of the blank figure is harder to endure than any speech.

Paul Clinton, Soft Heroes – Passivity and Weak agency in Thomas Liu Le Lann’s ShowDown, 2019 (Excerpts)