Lanyun Huang

A live art work and archive book exploring fetish, female eroticism, and symbolic violence through a spatial intervention at a KTV in Chinatown. Directed and produced by Lanyun Huang, the piece revolves around a man giving birth to a cake and a staged, fake birthday party. Performed by Finch, Corey, Shujing Huang, JiaoYang, Iresa Cho, Bella, Richard Dedomenici, Shuyi Wang 

In the Asian context, KTV is often regarded as a quasi-public site of consumption, typically marked by implicit entry barriers—structural thresholds such as age, gender, and class. At the same time, it frequently serves as a venue for birthdays, anniversaries, and other forms of private celebration. Artist Lanyun Huang stages a performance that draws upon this spatial ambiguity to unfold a ceremony at once intimate and mournful—a ritual that simultaneously celebrates and grieves.

Her performance unfolds in three stages. It begins with the artist’s recollection of early, private sexual fantasies, enacted within the enclosed space of a KTV room. She repeatedly soothes herself as blurred images flicker across the screen. No other figures are present—only the artist and a handful of spectators. This first phase constitutes a pre-symbolic stage, absent of external intervention, in which fantasy has not yet been marked by gendered roles or inscribed by the structural grammar of social language.

As the artist moves into another room, the next phase begins. At the center lies a male figure in labor, a visibly pregnant body. This figure collapses the boundary between symbolic violence and primal desire: DVDs, advertisements, AV films, and street posters—male-coded figures are rendered indispensable. The heterosexual imaginary, mediated through these images and visual regimes, begins to surface during the artist’s adolescence, repeating itself with such regularity that it gradually infiltrates her personal life. This binary narrative does not merely overlay itself upon the body—it cuts into it, leaving a rupture in what was once a self-contained corporeal form. A new, encoded mechanism of desire is subsequently constructed upon this trauma.

The history of the subject is nothing but a history of mourning.— Attributed to Silvia Lippi, Les destins de la masturbation (2013)

Symbolic violence constitutes a trauma that is neither reversible nor forgettable. The artist marks the birthday as a celebration—both to praise the new subject born under violence, and to mourn the death of the original self.

Balloons, stockings, and maternity novels lose their erotic connotation the moment the pregnant belly is cut open. At this moment, all figures return to their social roles: mother, father, friends, daughter.