Artist’s Statement
Tiger Balm is a hand-bound book of poetry and art, comprised of hand-made prints, drawings, and annotations as well as printed art and text. The piece is structured as a mosaic—a collection of fragmented memories and emotions that add up to the sum total of who, at this moment, I am. Titled after a Chinese traditional herbal ointment, Tiger Balm is for wounds: It is both a confessional narrative and philosophical treatise that grapples with selfhood, loneliness, and the ecology of existence. When applied, tiger balm is hot and cold at once—it brings a stinging, painful kind of relief. Learning how to feel pain without mutilation—that’s what this text is about. It’s about coming to understand incidental loneliness and hurt as a by-product of being alive, a beautiful side effect of existing.
Tiger Balm is deeply influenced by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Mayumo Inoue’s critical analysis of it in“THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA’S “PHANTOMNATION”: CINEMATIC SPECTERS AND SPECTRAL COLLECTIVITY IN DICTEE AND APPARATUS.” Cha’s work is a haunting, ghostly, fragmentary text that combines the historical and personal into a single lyrical piece. In Dictee, historical trauma and selfhood come to unite in a deeply societal yet intensely intimate critique and confessional text. At some point while reading the text, I came to the realization that everything I’d written or painted was distanced from anything that I was truly, physically pained by. In my art I engage very deeply with the internalized racism and trauma that comes with existing in a racialized (Asian American) body in the US. Yet, I somehow managed to avoid the things that cut to the bones of my personal existence. The canvas and my writing were sites of vulnerability—but only a strategic kind of vulnerability. Whenever I wrote about being “Asian American,” it was always about a generalized history and genealogy that I related to—and was mine, in a way—but not about more proximate sources of personal trauma and anxiety. I thought I was engaging in acts of healing and self-love, but really, writing, for me, was just another act of repression: I produced uncritically self-removed critiques of a series of ‘-isms'.’ Social critique was my way of removing myself from my art. It allowed for a certain kind of distance. Neutrality. This may seem counterintuitive, particularly when so much of my body of work was largely focused on the politics of race and identity, but this unselfconscious activism is exactly what I engaged in for quite a long time. I painted and wrote about the Asian American experience writ large—generalized narratives, not personal confession. How am I supposed to paint about what it means to be Asian American if I don’t first know what it means to be me? Another piece of this realization came from Inoue’s “PHANTOMNATION”: I began to understand that many of my efforts at discussing Asian American experience, as a consequence of having distanced such ruminations from the personal, incorporated a number of self-orientalizing tropes. It was, as Inoue puts it, an “anticolonial nationalist movement that…repeatedly resorts to a set of self-orientalizing tropes in describing its political autonomy and cultural uniqueness and whose discourse therefore remains a ‘derivative’ cousin of imperial nationalisms.” The nuance, simultaneity, and layered nature of Dictee denies such reductiveness—I wanted my work to be the same as well. To not be such predictable, legible performances of my racial identity. So that’s what this text is—my attempt at subverting my previous patterns of producing anti-vulnerable, self-orientalizing work.
But perhaps the most crucial influence on Tiger Balm was Professor Margaret Rhee, under whose guidance I undertook this project. Professor Rhee’s influence was critical in reimagining my project as a body—as opposed to an artifact or a piece of text—which then changed the way in which text, art, and annotation came to coalesce together into a single form in Tiger Balm. “What if you thought about this book as a body?” she asked me. I do—I think about it as my body, now. What is a body but a repository of memory, a vessel for the experiential fragments that come to form our “selves”? That is what Tiger Balm is.
Excerpt
This is not a substitute. This is not virtual. There is no second degree, but the pain is exponentially amplified, exponential. There is no simulacrum, no mimesis. This is tangible computing. There is no window, there just is.
,,is, is, is
Write about father, mother, family, ancestry, write about things you haven’t let yourself think about, the violence that you carried out on your brother, the violence your father carried out on your mother, the violence that the air, the sun, the men continually carry out on you.
The things you carry out
Far exceed what you carry.
Even now, the delete button is so close, so easy. That key is a cube of strategic vulnerability, of side-maneuvering the personal to the uncritically societal. It is a key of stagnation, of the present-indefinite, of lost past, of murdered future.[1] It stops time. The easiest key to use, box to enter.
There is grave disgrace in this refusal of that box. Disgrace to my ancestors, a losing of face. I am losing my face. My family is being stripped of their faces. Flesh in their place. A raw act. A violent one. I think my fingertips are being stripped of their prints, which fall off my hands like snakeskin. What lines I have are all left on this page.
The things we carry out
Are more painful than the things we carry.
But “nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery”[2] and it also brings about a withdrawal from the vital pressure of needs, until there is nothing left, except the pulsing, the rotational motions, the oscillating function of the waves, the sea.
The positioning of a confessional text must be the same mass-delusion of religion, Freud was wrong about one thing, it is not a mild narcosis, no, it is not a transient withdrawal, no, it is strong enough, it is strong enough, I think. So then, in writing this, am I, too, finding god?
Am I hoping that a piece of writing will absolve me of my guilt? Am I finding god? The same tide? That oceanic feeling. Limitless narcissism.
I thought I was being brave, but maybe I have only found a different house for my cowardice. A secular ocean for extreme narcosis, a young psychedelic god that I can induce with much less effort than that which is required by prayer.
“[W]ith every tool man is perfecting his own organs…or is removing the limits to their functioning.”[3] Then the keyboard must be the perfecting of the liver.
The liver’s function is to erase.[4] Past crimes. The drinks you drank, and, ostensibly, the sadness that made you drink the drinks you drank. There is a liver in a box, the delete key, at the upper right of my keyboard. I am looking at it right now. It means forget.
[1] Charles Yu. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).
[2] Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents. (New York: W.W.Norton & Co, 1961), pg. 31.
[3] Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents. (New York: W.W.Norton & Co, 1961), pg. 43.
[4] Influenced by Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely