Cast your net far and wide

jade yumang

august 24 - September 28

The body of work is informed by the history of a craft technique, filet lace, and a gay porn superstar, Brandon Lee. Filet lace was introduced to the Philippines via Spanish missionaries and then later adapted for American soldiers stationed in the islands to bring back home as a souvenir. Brandon Lee is a Filipino-American who created a racially ambiguous persona to alter perceptions of Asian American men in pornography. I use these strange bedfellows to explore mutable identities through the subversion of textile history and racial stereotypes in gay pornography.

This series combines filet lace with free-standing soft sculptures supported by bamboo structures. Filet lace is an open-work textile using netting as its base for an embroidered image or pattern. Whereas in my work I embroider a blank square where an image of Brandon Lee is imprinted within the fiber using dye sublimation. This is a printing process where the dye is turned into a gaseous state, through heat and pressure, to penetrate fiber with an image. This process is a metaphor for shapeshifting and codeswitching. The patterns for the soft sculptures are developed from Brandon Lee's sex scenes, where his body is bifurcated to render new abstract forms. The bamboo structures are inspired by fishing nets, where complex bamboo structures are attached using lashing knots to frame the nets. 

I am mashing up a historical craft technique with the image of a contemporary porn star. In the same way, imagery in filet lace shifted and changed over time, Brandon Lee’s persona in gay porn was a surprise that subverted expected tropes of queer Asian men. The grid in filet lace functions as a dominant paradigm while his onscreen façade overperforms sexual power dynamics revealing constructs of desire through a racialized body. I see queer craft as playfully reclaiming, reworking, and repeating rigid patterns to make visible infinite ways of making, which continuously results in flexible and soft forms.

Typically, the motifs embedded in filet lace are religious, geometric, mythological, or pastoral. Craftspeople follow and perfect an enforced pattern, but sometimes these designs fracture and deviate into new stories. Both endure in multiple histories and unfixed identities and I aim to mesh them together. 

-Jade Yumang