SOFT HEROES – PASSIVITY AND WEAK AGENCY IN THOMAS LIU LE LANN’S ShowDown

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

The meek, we have been told, will inherit the earth. Yet meekness, submissiveness and passivity are not exactly celebrated qualities, even in queer and feminist politics which focus on turning the weak into the strong; empowering the oppressed with all the associations of strength, resistance and mastery that term carries. Whilst this might seem the obvious thing to do, such struggles often end up endorsing existing models of power. Think of fights for more women business executives, which might make the boardroom look more representative of society at large, but do not necessarily change a corporate culture based entirely on cutthroat exploitation. One is simply seeking a piece of the existing pie, however ungenerous its proportions. It goes without saying that empowerment has also historically been gendered, with mastery and strength associated with celebrated masculinity, whereas passivity is seen as a negative quality, a feminine lack of character or will.

In recent years struggles for empowerment have also been combined with a renewed faith in identity and the individual. I’ve noticed a tendency for exhibitions to come with press releases denouncing’cis white men’ or to make work critiquing ‘cis gender people’ as if anyone who identifies as such will automatically be an oppressive enforcer of heteronormativity. The queer, by implication, is always automatically radical and resistant.
Whilst patriarchy and misogyny have to be targeted, accusations flung at cis people as if they are innately bad, risk
reinforcing the kinds of essentialism that those who believe in gender fluidity would seek to undo. Rather than mobilising one identity against another, it would be better to be less invested in the logics of representation and identification. Indeed, current faith in identity is an odd state of affairs considering that much queer theory argues that lives are scripted and subjectivity is constructed by social forces beyond individual control, leaving little room for the autonomous, transgressive subject. If one aim of queer politics is to decenter subjectivity and unlink identity from any spurious notion of the essential self, then who is the agent who acts independently and subversively?

Oppositional struggles often end up mirroring the very politics they oppose, and much feminist art has sought to parody this state of affairs. In her series of photographs So Help Me Hannah (1978-82) artist Hannah Wilke appears naked carrying a gun. Alternately predator and prey, Wilke is confined as much by feminist attempts to define female identity and relate it to some essential biology, as she is by male systems of objectification. In one photograph she appears on the floor, exhausted, head in her hands above a slogan that reads ‘What Does this Represent? What Do You Represent?’ The armed fight to master and control representation and identity not only resembles a patriarchal will to domination – the strong model of agency – but is itself a trap that limits the variety of what women can be or become. Against this backdrop of hopeless conflict, Thomas Liu Le Lann offers not pacifism but an embrace of passivity and giving up on the need for self-determination. In doing so he raises questions about who can control, or has the right to control, imagery relating to race and gender.

Although the title of Liu Le Lann’s installation is ShowDown (2018), the work itself appears, like Wilke’s, to have called a ceasefire in the war of identity. Soft toy Kalashnikov guns, made from stuffed vinyl, hang by chains from the ceiling or lean against walls, puckering at the seams and bending out of shape under their own weight. Phallic symbols rendered limp and impotent. Next to them, draped over transportation boxes or lying languidly on the floor are faceless, strangely elongated plush doll versions of the cute Japanese comic book hero Astro Boy. It’s as if this army of boys have given up, weak and exhausted. Between them are curtains – or perhaps more accurately screens for fantastical projection – printed with images of a highly mediated Asian male identity. On one side are shopping bags from luxury streetwear brand Supreme, fitted t-shirts displaying the yellow star of Vietnam, a flat screen bearing no image and what looks like a sweet, floppy-haired K-Pop boy band – signs of blankness, cuteness and vacuous consumption. The other side has a picture of the unassembled kit for a bulky, imposing and hyper macho Japanese Gundam robot – an Asian masculinity still yet to be assembled. Each of these signs, from the flaccid phallic guns, to the boyish dolls, point to a racist Western stereotype of Asian men as soft, effeminate and passive – a set of xenophobic associations much explored by Asian American queer thinkers including Richard Fung, David Eng and Nguyen Tan Hoang. Is the choice of the label Supreme an ironic joke on the lack of forceful, sovereign agency? Like a number of Liu Le Lann’s works ShowDown is a portrait of his relationship with his fiancé – who was born in mainland China and lives in Switzerland – their travels and the vexed ethics of depicting their life together. As it will turn out, the artist is not making work about any particular raced or sexualised identity, but pointing out the absurdity of assuming the right to speak for others, learning privileges of birth and masculinity as loss.

A first instinct might be to combat such stereotypes with an assertio of the masculinity and potency of Asian men. But as Nguyen Tan Hoang has argued, such a stance endorses a normative heterosexual set of values in which effeminate men, Asian or otherwise, are further stigmatised1 . What then happens to queer Asian men who enjoy sexual passivity and receptivity rather than phallic authority? Another stance, adopted by queer theorists, has been to argue that gay male passivity is actually a radical giving up of power. Think of Guy Hocquenghem’s assertion that ending the repression of receptive anal eroticism would help to destabilise patriarchy. Whilst acceptance of anal intercourse is necessary, by arguing that phallic power is subverted in the act of penetrating a man rather than a woman, he risks supporting an essentialism via the backdoor. Gay male passivity and receptivity becomes more potent than that of women or other gender nonconforming subjects. The subversiveness attributed to this loss of control implies a subject who already possesses a degree of social power and masculinity that can be undermined. As Nguyen points out, since Asian men are already marginalised and desexualised by Western society there can be no radical loss of power in such an embrace of passivity. This would only ‘lead to an amplification of their subjection and lowly position’2 .

Liu Le Lann instead presents passivity without reclaiming it as radical queer insurgency nor as something to be countered with images of masculinity. Not only have his figures laid down their arms, but his installation displays a marked ambivalence about the idea of political liberation. The curtains bear the slogan ‘Strike Freedom’ – a play on the name of a Gundam robot – which could be read as a call to fight for freedom, or more likely given the context, an instruction to give up on the idea of redemption and strike freedom from the record. Not obviously offering a way to recuperate passivity as mastery, his work resembles that of the late artist Tetsumi Kudo, whose sculptures abound with images of impotent, limp or decaying dicks and frustrated men. Emerging from the same long post-war context as Gundam and Astro Boy, Kudo reacted against two opposing cultural trends. On one side was a rising nationalism which sought to set right the emasculation of Japan; on the other, a counterculture no less virile or potent, which like Hocquenghem argued that desire, freed of all restrictions, could dismantle capitalism and normative society.

The Gundam typified these two cultural tendencies. Comprising gigantic robotic suits into which Japanese men can climb, they offer size, strength and technological-cultural progress as literal supplements for the stereotypi cal image of Asian male smallness and softness. By contrast, Liu Le Lann’s flaccid and half- formed depictions of Gundam and Astro Boy are stripped of their associations with a white, Wes tern model of masculinity. Affirmative images, his work makes clear, often depend upon the same ideals of physi cal perfection as the racist and sexist ideologies they seek to combat. Des cribing Jean Michel Basquiat’s rough and scribbled drawings of Superman and Batman, José Esteban Muñoz has argued that they can be understood as examples of disidentification: an attempt neither to affirm nor reject the representations of a dominant culture, but to remake and remodel them in ways that are more hospitable3 . In softening and weakening these heroic figures, Liu Le Lann neither endorses a dominant masculinity nor promises its autonomous and subversive undoing, but depicts them as great without the need to mimic Western physical attributes.

But the question arises of what right Liu Le Lann – who is white and was born in France – has to make work dealing with Asian male identity. Outcry against cultural appropriation is rife in the art world, dominated by arguments that those who do not belong to a minority group – either racial or sexual – should not be able to draw cultural capital from their traumatic struggles. Appropriation describes theft, taking something that isn’t yours and profiting from it. The word implies personal gain without personal cost – or, in the case of cultural appropriation, the frisson of transgression without the history of oppression that comes with it. But queer thinker Calvin Thomas argues that there are other ways of engaging with struggles that are not your own. In place of appropriation, an encounter with cultural difference can be a means of calling into question one’s own unspoken and unconscious privileges. If an artist takes on the effects of minority politics to destabilise rather than consolidate their own authority – to lose rather than gain something – an act of proliferation rather than appropriation takes place4 .

Liu Le Lann’s work makes no claims to authenticity or experience, working only on highly mediated images that render visible failures in representation, rather than essential truths. In focussing only on the stereotype as a stereotype, he recognises it as a tool of oppression without claiming the ability to see beyond signs and surface to the truth of Asian male identity. No claim is made to know and have mastered another culture or other subjects. He takes raced and gendered passivity and exaggerates it to parodic effect – the figures are faceless, their soft bodies border on formlessness, the flat screen is pixelated and vacant – so that it loses all specificity or identity. There is no transgressive, exotic subject or agency to be identified with, as the absolute submissiveness of his cartoonish figures recede even from attempts at affirmation, making visible the gendered and race assumptions harboured by progressive politics. Liu Le Lann’s work is not, it turns out, about Asian male identity at all, but about the impotence of privileged attempts to speak for, represent or define others. It is, in the words of Gayatri Spivak, about ‘learning your privilege as your loss’. The encounter with a different construct of maleness, however stereotypical is also an invitation to rethink the privilege role of normative masculinity that persists even in queer models of political agency, such as that of Hocquenghem.

Of course, the ability for minority subjects to speak about their own history, to gain power and platform historically denied to them remains urgent. White artists should not deny place, voice or income to those who remain underrepresented within institutions and cultural life. But there must be caution about placing a burden of authenticity on the underrepresented, rendering them as symbols or spokespeople for a group, not individuals and artists in their own right. In Liu Le Lann’s work, the demand that we all represent something or someone – the plaintive questions of Wilke’s photograph – is returned with a haunting emptiness of the flat-screen which broadcasts nothing at all. These are questions which haunt Liu Le Lann’s practice as he asks how he can record his relationship without speaking for another, especially when that person is ‘othered’ by society at large?

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 is a writer, curator and editor based in London, UK. He is the 2019- 21 Royal Academy Fellow in Criticism, Royal Academy Schools, London. For four years he was a senior editor at the international art and culture magazines Frieze and Frieze Masters, before leaving to work as a writer and take up the post of lecturer in curating at Goldsmiths. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Frieze, the London Review of Books, MOUSSE, Art Monthly, Art Review and The White Review. Articles include on the artists Gustav Metzger, Cosey Fanni Tutti, David Goldblatt and Terry Richardson, the queer theorist Didier Eribon and on topics as diverse as class in the art world, solidarity in activism, and the philosophy of Pierre Klossowski. He has also been commissioned to write exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as artists Bonnie Camplin and Sophie Jung, and shows from London to Milan. In addition, he has made short videos covering social mobility and interior design with Pablo Bronstein, curating fashion, and staging biennials in the UAE.

  1. Nguyen Tan Hoang, A View from the Bottom, 2014, Duke University Press, p. 19
  2. Ibid.
  3. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications, 1999, University of Minnesota Press, p. 41
  4. Calvin Thomas, Straight With A Twist, 2000, University of Illinois Press.

Paul Clinton, SOFT HEROES – PASSIVITY AND WEAK AGENCY IN THOMAS LIU LE LANN’S ShowDown, essai, catalogue d’exposition, Fondation Paribas & HEAD, Genève, Suisse, 2019