The Avulsed Rabbit
Wei Zhang
The Avulsed Rabbit available here via CCA Annex was originally exhibited as part of Sooun Kim and Wei Zhang’s Intermedia Gallery exhibition that ran from 19 August — 17 September 2021. Sooun Kim’s Unmuted Cave, 2021 is also available on CCA Annex.
Content Warning: Please note this work contains strong imagery that includes sexual assault that some viewers may find distressing
Working between moving image, performance and installation, Wei Zhang’s work explores spaces where reproduction, bloodline, family, kinship, queerness, memory and trauma intertwine. Influenced by post-humanism, post-colonialism and queer theory, Zhang links Chinese Marxism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism to depict the inner fusion and confrontation of the hybrid identity ‘Sino-queer’. Impure, discontinuous, intermedial film images of red latex and gold leaves blend together through digital collage, creating a surreal environment where the damages of patriarchy, hierarchy, and the sociopolitical manipulation of sex and the body are interrogated.
The Avulsed Rabbit is a short film inspired by Wei Zhang’s adolescent trauma of social exclusion and bullying. The work reflects on incidents of verbal abuse and sexual assault that resulted from their femininity and queerness, navigating their own identity and the pressures from those around them. Zhang simultaneously employs their own footage with found video, celluloid and digital images, alongside 3D and 2D animation creating a fictionalised narrative both poetic, unstable and resonant with Zhang’s interior world. This blended aesthetic, reflects on hybrid identity and the potential of reconstructing autobiographical subjectivity as an act of resistance to heteropatriarchy and homophobia.