(Vag)Anal Painting

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.

This homoerotic and scatological performance is not only an homage to Shigeko Kubota's Vagina Painting (1965) but, more urgently, a tongue-in-cheek response to gendered and racialized representations and readings of bodies in contemporary culture. "If Kubota challenged the works of male artists like Pollock, Klein, and Paik--by counterposing the female body's productivity to the masculine painterly gestures loaded with phallic symbolism--I want my work to be read against two forces. First, (East) Asian calligraphy. Many practitioners believe in a link between male virility and the strength of his brush stroke, the brush tip standing in for the phallus. Through scatological markmaking, I aim to 'pollute' this phallogocentrism. Second, I want to interrogate the white gaze, and how the Asian body, or for that matter, Asia as a body, is feminized (see Said)."--David Khang, an excerpt from Interview with Glenn Alteen, brunt magazine, Issue #1