Taste her Fruit, Bless the Whore

In this work, Diana Mulan Zhu invited viewers into an erotic performance and site specific installation of her single channel film Taste her Fruit, Bless the Whore. The film is a queer sex positive retelling of the mythological trope where women are punished for transgressive gluttony of eating forbidden fruit. Persephone, Chang’e, Eve and many others in both Western and Eastern myths have been cursed for overindulgence and sensual excess.

Viewers are guided to sit with her on the same bed sheets on location in the arboretum where her short film was shot. She invites them into her space as they feel comfortable, based on consent, trust and care whether it is into her arms, or sitting side by side comfortably. She asks them for dietary restrictions or preferences and thenfeeds them while they listened with noise cancelling headphones, creating a feedback loop of erotic labor, pleasure, touch, and sound.

She watches them watch herself orgiastically gorge herself on the fruit. Onscreen, she goes unpunished. The viewers also leave sated. They rewrite the narrative into a queer futurity of sensual exchange, mutuality and renewal.

The artist performed this at A Dawn and Two Dusks, the performance festival on May 30th-May 31st 2025 hosted at University of Santa Cruz Arboretum.

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Consumed (2022)

Diana Mulan Zhu’s installation, Consumed, consists of several mixed media elements including a bed with bedsheets covered in stains from Chinese takeout, a video work made up of vintage pornography clips projected onto the bed, and a recorded performance work by the artist displayed on a laptop. Having experienced the traumatizing experience of being exposed to and subsequently obsessively watching porn as a young child, the artist revisits this trauma in this absurd and cheeky installation as a means of rewriting her painful childhood experience. In the video work, Zhu visually and sonically overlays porn scenes from 1990s-2000s that feature Asian women, recalling that pornography was the only form of media where Zhu saw Asian women on the screen. In the recorded performance that plays on the laptop, Zhu sits on the bed while watching her video work and devours American-style Chinese takeout. This frenzied binging refers to cycles of shame and the body as well as stands as a metaphor for the obligatory force-feeding of Americanized images of Asian culture through her childhood.

Documentation video of “Consumed” (2021)

“Consumed” (2022). Bed, sheets, pillows, curtains. hot and sour soup, lo mein, two channel video. Color.

Two Channel Video Installation

A documentation of a performance art piece where the artist, Diana Mulan Zhu, binges Chinese American take out while watching short film she has made remixing vintage porn, as she recalls the painful memories of her childhood.

A short film representing the traumatic memory of watching Asian fetish porn for the first time, made of clips of vintage porn from the 90s and 2000s.

Peanut Butter Pizza (2021)

This video installation, “Peanut Butter Pizza” is built on the personal and social history of the artist. Diana draws on her family history as a second generation Chinese American whose family suffered under the oppressive regime of Maoist Cultural Revolution. She draws personal diaristic and memoir methods to rewrite and reclaim intergenerational trauma.

The video projected combines many elements. First, there is a computerized narration of diary entries written recently reminiscing about the artist’s parents immigrating to America. Second, there are the visual video elements of Instagram story snippets (ephemeral social media posts that disappear in 24 hours meant for quotidian journalistic documentation)  filmed when the artist first moved to New York City at the same age that her parents were when they moved to America, as well as subtitles of “subtext” for the narration.

The artist’s parents are Chinese immigrants growing up in the cultural revolution of the Maoist regime who were in Beijing as college students marching at the TiananMen Square Massacres, a historic tragedy where the Chinese regime massacred groups of student protesting for liberty and democracy. 

The film meditate on the gaps in place and the legacy of ideals instilled in American politics. At the end of the film, the narrator recounts a time early on after moving to a small town in rural Washington where they had heard of a uniquely american delicacy--the pineapple on pizza. Yet when they tried to call the pizza delivery shop and ask for it, the pizza they got delivered to their home was a pizza with peanut butter on it. 

In this installation and film, the peanut butter pizza acts as a metaphor for the gap between the ideal and the reality, of the American Dream, of escaping oppression and in turn coming to a place with other kinds of oppression.  

Peanut butter pizza acts as an anchor for this piece and physical manifestations of this in the form of the pizza boxes on the wall, the pile of flour and peanut butter on the floor serve as an assemblage of motifs and objects from the video to create of immersion of the memory and shame and history. There are also subtle gestures to a surreal subway car but also the sleaziness of a strip club. This liminal border of space that picks up on the bodily and materiality of peanut butter and painted walls echoing colors in the film all serve to create an overwhelming sensorial cacophony. This information overload echoes the experience of the immigrant but also the second generation child of an immigrant that has to negotiate between dual spaces.