M Butterfly (after Shigeko Kubota)

David Khang is a visual, performance, and biological artist whose practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively imbeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages that materialize in visual, textual, and spoken forms. In performing, Khang often embodies these languages to interrogate social constructions - of gender, race, and interspecies relations - that are present within dominant historic narratives in contemporary culture. By strategically employing non-native languages and code switching, Khang produces divergent, dissonant, and often hyperbolic and humorous readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political.

M. Butterfly (After Shigeko Kubota) is citational by design. In 1960, La Monte Young wrote his Composition 1960 #5, which instructs the performer to "Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area." In 1965, Shigeko Kubota performed Vagina Painting at the Perpetual Fluxus Festival, Cinemateque, NYC. In 1988, David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly premiered on Broadway, NYC. In 2007, these historically significant pieces--all performed in NYC--become departure points that converge in one re-mixed performance, with the potential for divergent readings with contemporary social, political, racial, and sexual implications. Through this piece, reinterpreting performance works from the past becomes a means of re-imagining new poetic and political strategies for the present