A Sky Full of Stars: A body-positive workshop centring sense of acceptance, self-appreciation and love
by Whiskey Chow
This online workshop aims to reset a sense of acceptance, self-appreciation, healing and love, by creating a safe space for all types of bodies and genders to collectively build up a self-adoring narrative via presentation and representation of one’s body.
Queer Asian artist Whiskey Chow invites UK-based migrant cultural workers to participate and explore the relationship between one’s body and oneself; embracing vulnerability and intimacy. This is a group experiment to self-curate a bodyscape that stands for an unapologetic queer path to alternative beauty.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, migrants are often overlooked by the governmental support system. As one of the precarious migrant cultural workers herself, Whiskey intends to create a vital space for these unseen bodies to deal with memories, trauma, cultural heritage, and marginalized live experiences. With this ethos and participants’ consent, a new video work will be created: a collective bodyscape of UK migrant cultural workers.
A Sky Full of Stars will take advantage of digital meeting software to create a safe space for participants who will be encouraged to bring one image representing/reflecting their relationship between themselves and their bodies. Those images will work as a shelter allowing participants to express freely, without showing their faces. All visual communication in the workshop will be through still and moving image of one’s body, but participants will have full control of their own agency.
By participating in the workshop, you will have the opportunity to become part of Chow’s final moving image work. To guarantee the ownership of your agency, you will be asked for consent at the end of the workshop.
Duration:
11:00 am – 4:00 pm BST
5 hours (including a lunch break and regular breaks throughout)
Sat. 26 September 2020
N.B.
As a candidate, you will be asked two simple questions when you register, then you will be informed later for your acceptance. This selection process does not aim to make things competitive, it is just a way to optimize the experience of all participants and the final outcome of the workshop.
This workshop opens to all under-represented voices, with focus on migrant cultural workers’ body and experiences, but not exclusively. The final decision will be made according to answers from candidates.
A Sky Full of Stars is produced by Queer Art Projects.
Funded and supported by Artquest as part of their WFH Residency. The first iteration of this workshop was part of the Returning To Home series of workshops curated by Annie Jael Kwan for performingbordersLIVE20.
Special thanks to Ruth Holdsworth for initial production support.
About the lead artist:
Whiskey Chow
London-based performance artist and Chinese drag king. Whiskey’s art practice engages with broadly defined political issues, covering a range of related topics: from female and queer masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, to stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Her performance is interdisciplinary, combining embodied performance with moving image and experimental sound pieces.
As an artist-curator, Whiskey launched, led and performed in ‘Queering Now 酷兒鬧’ in 2020 (as part of CAN Festival). Queering Now is a curatorial programme amplifying marginalized voices of Chinese/Asian queer diaspora in the West.
Whiskey currently works as Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Guest Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Chelsea College of Arts.
Whiskey has been involved in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China since 2011. She contributed to and performed in ‘For Vaginas’ Sake 將陰道獨白到底 (2013)’ (original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues), and curated the first Chinese LGBTQ music festival, ‘Lover Comrades Concert 愛人同志音樂會 (2013)’, Guangzhou.
Whiskey's recent performances include: The Moon is Warmer than the Sun, Queering Now, Rich Mix, London (2020); Unhomeliness, Tate Modern, London; Whiskey the Conqueror, Tate Britain, London (2018); Purely Beautiful New Era (ft. Haocheng Wu), Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Great Conversation, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2017).