My Body Holds Its Shape

“We are all prisoners here,” is the thought I had each time I went to visit the exhibition drafted by Xue Tan, “My Body Holds Its Shape,” over the course of its four-month run. The pair of live performers clad in gray sweatsuits in Eisa Jocson’s (2020) were the first to impart this impression, as they enacted animalistic gestures and routines that transformed them into quasi-human (1989) and try to coax a trill out of you while repeating that they were “at your service.” Every time you entered this simulcast gallery space you became an instantaneous, involuntary participant—a “captive audience”—and the experience would grow uncomfortably exploitative as you stared at or recorded them. The dynamic evoked not only encounters with animalized human characters at amusement parks, or humanized animals at zoos, but also the exploitation of financially desperate and politically powerless Philippine bodies for servitude and cheap labor in Hong Kong and around the world, often in performative service-industry roles.