Alejandro Junyao Zhang

By Genevieve Waller

Is digital space a queer utopia? The artist Alejandro Junyao Zhang is working to make it so. Using electronic music, performance, 3D animation, and video, Zhang creates environments where their own body as well as elements of LGBTQ+ and Chinese culture are on display and celebrated. The resulting works are confrontational and euphoric, drawing audiences in as both spectators and participants in alternate worlds where heterosexual dominance and gender binaries are not the norm and liberation awaits.

Zhang is a Shanghai-based artist who graduated from Shanghai Ocean University in 2018 and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2021. In 2018, Zhang began composing an electronic music album inspired by the underground, queer dance club scene in Shanghai. Adopting the name Öil Nature, Zhang put together a collection of voice samples, synth sounds, and driving beats to produce a dark and dynamic set of songs.

Conjuring the immersive soundscapes, pleasures, and freedoms of places where LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people come together to dance, lose themselves in the music, and find community and acceptance, these songs are part of the legacy of dance music’s connection to queer culture. In the U.S., these ties stretch back at least to the beginnings of disco in the 1970s and really even further. Lesbian women, gay men, and trans folks coming together to dance has a long history, and many LGBTQ+ individuals have been at the forefront of dance music production and DJing for decades.

Zhang clues into this history, and in 2019 they created a performance DJing their music in a gallery space in Minneapolis. Titled M.E.S.S., the work featured Zhang wearing a mask made of tin foil spikes that obscured their face; shirtless, save for a few goth leather straps, a silver spike necklace, and large silver chains down their back; and sporting black silk pants patterned with white birds and gold plants—a deliberate nod to Zhang’s Asian identity and perhaps orientalist fantasies. The artist sat on the floor with control boards and a laptop, playing music in front of a projection of glitched out videos that included animated images of Buddhist statues and flickering facades of houses with skewed colors.

Surrounded by the gallery audience, Zhang performed as a musician, a DJ, a video artist, and as a persona combining gay leather culture, Chinese ethnicity, and a queer body as a spectacle, an enticement, and a challenge. Together, the electronic music, Zhang’s attire, and the digital video projection transformed the space into an analog of a queer dance club, forcing the gallery attendees to imagine themselves in a queer space. And with the hammering, “hard style” quality of the music, the artist’s provocative outfit and scary mask, and the video’s jarringly-combined and digitally-disintegrated images, this was undoubtedly a confrontational gesture. In effect, Zhang compelled the audience to enter a queer space and contend with a queer, Asian, sexually assertive figure as a guide and instigator.

In February 2020, Zhang presented a performance titled YAY Pt.2.5 in another Minneapolis gallery. During the opening reception for the group exhibition Untitled 16 at the Soo Visual Arts Center, Zhang walked through the audience wearing a flowered dress with a hoop skirt, a matching flowered band tied around their head, and an elbow-length, shiny, olive-colored glove on their right arm. The artist approached various individuals in the crowd, asking each one to hold the gloved hand and touch or hold Zhang’s other bare hand. When each person did so, sound emanated from the hoop skirt and their bodies created a circuit with Zhang’s, activating the sound chip and speaker under the skirt. As Zhang playfully tapped each participant’s hands with their bare fingers, tinkling keyboard notes played.

From the video documentation, we can see the interactions between the artist and the audience: Zhang and the participants speak, make eye contact, and touch. There are multiple metaphorical meanings we can infer from the act of two bodies coming together to produce something not possible alone—in this case, electronic sounds. But what matters most in this performance is each individual’s interaction with Zhang as a femme-presenting, queer, Asian person. By speaking one-on-one with Zhang and looking into their eyes while touching, each participant consents to an intimate encounter with someone who might be a stranger in multiple senses. As Zhang playfully taps their fingers on each audience member’s hand and arm, and encourages them to “play” the artist’s skin to make notes too, the flirtatious interchange becomes an up close and personal experience with Zhang and their queer-coded body, facilitated through computer-generated music.

When the COVID-19 pandemic made live performances impossible, Zhang turned more exclusively to composing music and also to 3D animation. Their 2020 video Thrashed is a response to isolation and the impossibility of queer community within physical spaces due to the pandemic. It combines a hammering techno soundtrack with manipulated video imagery of Zhang performing for the camera as well as digitally-rendered, idealized settings.

The first half of the video features footage of single, multiple, and mirrored images of Zhang striking poses for the camera in a completely black space. Their body is nude except for a pair of clear high heels and a simple cord necklace, and they look into the camera as they dance in the voguing style of a drag ballroom performer. The footage is digitally manipulated, with Zhang’s skin tone keyed to a golden yellow—no doubt playing with racist stereotypes of Asian skin—and as the video transitions into an animated scene Zhang appears as a figure with multiple, afterimage arms then whirling arms like a high speed windmill. 

Zhang becomes an animated character in 3D-modeled scenes that feature fields of plants, silver spike structures (à la M.E.S.S.), Chinese dragon sculptures, gravestones, historic Chinese houses, and pairs of Bodhisattva statues. In their MFA talk, Zhang points out that Bodhisattva statues are genderless, which is significant during these scenes as Zhang positions their blurred, whirring body among the Bodhisattvas—queering these Buddhist symbols by associating them with the artist. In effect, by creating Thrashed, Zhang builds a virtual environment as an idealized space for themself to inhabit where they are safe from homophobia as well as COVID-19.

In Habitat, from later in 2020, Zhang takes many of the ideas from Thrashed a step further. Focusing almost exclusively on a digitally-rendered setting, the artist builds a fantasy space with very few ties to the real world. A yellow, organic-looking, double-arched structure floats in the blackness of perhaps outer space, with various colorful objects resting on top and spiraling circles hovering above. The lighting flashes and flickers, like in a dance club, and then the yellow world with all of its accoutrements starts to melt and the two arches spin inward and outward, defying all rules of space and time. 

Like in Thrashed, Zhang’s blurred-out, whirling-armed figure appears, along with statues, including Buddhas’ heads buried in the yellow ground. Repeated, spiked purple forms sit in a stack and Chinese characters that say “spiritually fierce” and “drums” (according to the artist’s website) float and spin. As the ground, objects, and figures spin, the undulating movements and strobing lights and colors are choreographed to the beats and noises of the rhythmic, electronic soundtrack that Zhang composed.

Habitat embodies Zhang’s desire to create a utopia, queer space that is truly otherworldly. The artist also points out that this work is a “protest against the social nonacceptance of queer identity in Chinese society” and is an “alternate reality” where “queer can bloom” and the audience can “liberate their identity.” In this work, Zhang builds on the strategies they employed in M.E.S.S., YAY Pt.2.5, and Thrashed to bring their queer body to the forefront and convert spaces into alternative, queer environments where audiences participate no matter what their gender and sexual identities might be. With Habitat, we experience a queer apotheosis where digital tools and electronic sounds enable us to leap into a new, unfamiliar world where all forms of gender and all sexualities are possible and embraced.

Genevieve Waller (she/her) is a visual artist and writer based in Denver, Colorado. She creates cameraless photographs, installations, sculptures, and videos, and researches and writes about art history, contemporary art, film, LGBTQ+ culture and history, and music. She is the founder and editor of DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis and she holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history, a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography and art history, and a Master of Arts degree in visual and cultural studies. Her drag persona is a goth leatherman called The Dark Manner.