letters

Dear C Mag,

The last issue spoke to something I’ve been thinking about often: that one of the most effective ways to neuter a destructive force is to laugh at its desperate fervour to harm. I think about the New York artist Betty Tompkins who turns crowd-sourced submissions of the cruel things men say to women into carefully rendered paintings and drawings. Divorced from their original contexts, violent phrases like “You are a dumb bitch” become neutered and bizarre. Similarly, the Hong Kong video artist Wong Ping uses gallows humour in his brightly coloured, jovial animations to critique the complexities of an increasingly authoritarian society. Even as freedoms of expression in his city have drastically