Exhibition Review: <i>Charlotte Zhang: Paradise Holds Itself Shut</i> in Los Angeles

Paradise Holds Itself Shut, Charlotte Zhang’s first solo exhibition, presented the abject pleasures of Asiatic womanhood as produced through the sexual economies of war, immigration, and marriage. In photographs printed and handstitched in poly-satin collages, the Chinese Canadian artist sutures together military imagery, pornography, medical illustrations, and pop cultural perversions. Hung on wires, the prints resemble flags made of flayed skin: rosy assemblages of women, warplanes, politicians, amputations, soldiers, patients, and rapists, mug-shotted and captioned with the nature of their crime in shaky print. Arrayed for viewing displeasure are anonymous thighs and ass irradiated in red light, the squeaky white uniforms of K-pop stars and all-American nurses, a woman in hot-pink leopard print and handcuffs being taken away by a narcotics officer. A chained, possibly doped-up tiger dozes, superimposed on Chinese schoolgirls reading English vocabulary words from a blackboard. Phantasmic faces in ambiguous rapture or pain, overlaid upon each other, remain for the most part unnamed and, as Zhang phrases it in her artist statement, unavenged. Precariously spliced together, these curious collisions of history are provided without citation in an anarchic archival intervention. Fugitive traces of trauma and dubious intimacies tie the knot in a monstrous marriage, producing an unpacifiable racial nausea.In suturing together these grotesqueries of history, Zhang holds a funhouse mirror to the narratives of romance, rescue, and redemption that violently regulate Asian women in the United States empire. Paradise Holds Itself Shut traffics in racial archetypes and racial kitsch: “[t]he tycoon’s wife, the mail-order / bride, the expat’s take-home prize, / the proteges of intrepid God- / fearing governesses, the massage / parlor sting arrest, the deportee.”1 Kitsch is active here in the sense of the sentimental, naive, sleazy, and over-apparent, saturated with pitying sympathy. Fetishized, victimized, and infantilized, these sexual stereotypes serve as political rationale and “sentimentalist pin-up”2 to prop up the projects of imperialism and neocolonialism. Yet, reappropriated and recontextualized in their illicit afterlives, these stereotypes point to the disruptive power of kitsch when taken out of time and primed with a different affect. These images are not self-evident but point to the nature of their constructedness through puckered surfaces, vertiginous changes in depth and scale, and visible multicolored threads like the fiber-optic cables that transmit data across the internet. Resisting sentiment in favor of an irony that does mayhem to narrative and revels in absurdity, Zhang’s touch has a clinical quality both exacting and wracked with hot shivers of wrath. The images at once resist, agitate, and arouse queasy pleasures that do not go down easily or unaccounted for.If there is a paradise, it is the paradisiacal logic of imperial pleasures that the artist interrogates. As suggested by titles like The punisher/The ecstasy of Saint Donaldina (2022) and Cupid with weak wings (conjugal bliss and honeymoon diplomacy) (2023), there is an iconographic quality to these works and their portrayals of mortification, rapture, punishment, and ascension. There are holy unions and rescued souls, adoptive madonnas and divine patriarchs, martyrish Asian girls and cherubic children with cleft palates. Attending them are an angelic army of Red Cross nurses and United Nations troops, administering resuscitation and enforcing dependence. Among the redeemed are unconscious Asian women wearing oxygen masks, shot in somnophilic close-ups that stir associations with the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. Awaiting her white savior, she—the archetypal victim—is endlessly available, eternally violated.In the all-enveloping enthrallment of the holy, history loses specificity and variation. Paradise Holds Itself Shut is an operating theater where Zhang pares open time to reveal “the erotic viscera enfolding the pageantry of war and conquest.”3 We see the prone flesh and exposed throats of Asian women in orgasmic postures as if suspended at the height of pleasure or surrender. Hands are everywhere, telegraphing ardent and authorized gestures of agreement, assistance, supplication, negation, and explanation. Nothing is given away or provided freely. This glut of pornographic-political media expands indefinitely in the emptiness of erotic time, where the same images, motifs, and storylines are regurgitated without end, without hope of redress or revenge for such degradation.Zhang, in an accompanying zine also titled Paradise Holds Itself Shut and published by Cassandra Press, draws references to the Page Act of 1875, passed to ban the immigration of Asian women to the US for “lewd and immoral purposes”4; Operation Babylift, which forcibly evacuated thousands of children from South Vietnam and distributed them for adoption by families around the world5; and the Subic Rape Case, involving a Filipina woman and four US Marines.6 The artist traces consanguinities from Thai sex tourism and evangelical missions in China to hate crime legislation developed in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic that legitimizes increased policing in the name of protecting the vulnerable. In every version of the state-propagated story as revealed in Zhang’s exhibition, the Asian woman must paradoxically be both protected from and against. Made alien through latent fears of sexual impurity and racial mixing, she must undergo mortification to arrive at a promised assimilation that can never quite be attained. Over and over, she performs a requisite degradation for the rewards of white love, protection, and redemption. This narrative finds no satisfaction; there is no happy ending. Only an unpayable debt from an unsolicited rescue, exacted in blood, sex, and submission. It is this purgatorial logic that holds together “paradise,” understood etymologically as an “enclosed park or pleasure ground”7 and denoting here the carceral state of racial capitalism.And yet paradise is not inviolable, as proven by these very exertions to hold itself shut. There is disaffection in its hellish heart, articulated by Zhang through the gothic forms of hauntings, monsters, inherited curses, decay, doubleness, and duplicity. In Hospital scene II (the floodwall; medical eros and pornographies of pain) (2023), a lithograph of a whipping is split into two by the intrusion of a fuzzy image of a face in open-mouthed agony, at once anticipating and postponing the fall of the whip onto the woman in the following panel. In Hospital scene I (fainting tuberculosis maidens and virtuous nurse-mothers) (2022), a woman swathed in medical gauze that reveals as it restricts, accentuating her nipples and amorous eyes, stares back at the viewer with an expression that provokes in more ways than one. Like the fragments of the artist’s own face that look reproachfully into our eyes, she is both individual and interchangeable with the archetype, reflective of and resistant to this kinship of resemblance, sympathetic pain, and shared fate. In this sense, Paradise Holds Itself Shut reads as a rageful self-portrait by a voyeur of oneself, witness to her own damnation.In the zine, Zhang writes, “Of all the missionaries who ever / came to town you were my / favorite; I read your reports as / though it were not my own / salvation at stake, imagined I / was there beside you on all your / daring rescue missions.” As if sharing the missionary’s nervous system, the unnamed narrator feels “the flutter of arousal” when he grabs hold of a girl in the dark even as she senses the “whistle of air through her rotting teeth.”8 Appropriating his voice and his gaze in the dark, and his pleasure for her own, she becomes the hero: the enemy within paradise.

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