Explore what it means to be (in)visible and how it relates to the individual, with a chance to stay and talk with the artist afterwards.
This lecture performance uses a tangled, multivocal combination of archival historical records, fictive responses, speculative texts, autoethnographic and interviewee accounts of lived mixed race experience in Hong Kong, as well as found photographs and wearables. It unsettles the origins and ongoing attitudes towards mixed race identity in Hong Kong, from stigma to fetishization, and how assumptions along that continuum are shaped by discredited but still prevalent racial hierarchical norms. In the bodily lived experience of mixed race, binary oppositions make no sense, there can be no fault line of ‘them’ and ‘us’ within the body. Not half but both.
Kay Mei Ling Beadman is an artist, researcher and co-founder of Hidden Space, an independent artist-run space in Hong Kong. She uses her own Chinese and English mixed heritage as an autoethnographic springboard to explore aspects of complex dual identity formation, drawing on embodied aspects of lived experience amid socio-politically and culturally constructed assumptions. Her practice is multidisciplinary and includes installation, video, painting, text and performance. Beadman was born in England, zigzagged between Hong Kong and the UK growing up, but has lived and worked permanently in Hong Kong since 1999. She has a BFA from the University of Reading, UK, an MFA from RMIT University, Australia, and is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
‘Closer Together’ opens Tuesday 20 June, for further information visit rmitgallery.com.
Image: Kay Mei Ling Beadman, Invisibility Cloaks, 2021, Synthetic gold and silver lamé, clothing racks, hangers. Image courtesy of the artist.
