LENA CHEN
Lena Chen is a Los Angeles-based Chinese American artist working across performance, moving image, and social practice. Awarded Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award and Best Emerging Talent at B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, she has explored race, gender, labor, and sexuality often through the lens of her own experience as a mother, former sex worker, and survivor of revenge porn. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, she studies the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers.
Chinese Touch, 2023, Video
Chinese Touch interrogates authenticity, pleasure, and agency as an Asian woman in the diaspora. The video renders the pornographic facial uncanny by looping the moments before ejaculation, suspending desire and centering Asian actresses’ waiting faces while male bodies remain unseen. Appropriated porn clips are juxtaposed with scenes from Joyce Chen Cooks (1966–67), remixing domestic pedagogy with 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” to trace how Asian femininity oscillates between model minority and hypersexual fantasy for white audiences. By pairing racialized porn with the first cooking show hosted by a woman of color in the US, the work probes self-objectification and spectatorship through the metaphor of consumption. Rather than simply rejecting stereotype, Chinese Touch confronts taboo pleasures of consuming and being consumed, revealing agency, ambivalence, and desire within images that provoke discomfort.
​
All works in this exhibition are available to purchase. To find out more, please email: loveforsale.exhibit@gmail.com