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.
