I Enjoy Being A Girl Screening & Talk

I Enjoy Being A Girl, the photo-video essay, is part of an ongoing project “Anita & Ava – Photography as a Self-restorative Tool”, which looks at how two childhood friends explored their gender identity through photography, as they transitioned into adulthood. Fan Chon originally found this series of photographic portraits in an antique shop in Penang. The portraits were of the late Ava Leong taken in the 1950s and 1960s in which she self-restored from an adolescent boy to a woman. After the artist got in touch with Ava’s surviving lifelong friend, Anita, the collection expanded and he carried out a series of interviews with Anita to gather background information on these photographs. A compilation of Anita’s voices is used as the foundation of this video essay. These audio clips are juxtaposed with a selection of Ava and Anita’s photographic collection that reveals their journey of self-discovery through studio photography and other social activities, Anita’s working experience as a school lab technician and her life on stage as a woman impersonator. These photographs symbolise a time when they, together with their peers from the transgender community, were allowed to explore their sense of self while contributing to a lively cosmopolitan artistic culture in Malaysia.

Artist
Hoo Fan Chon is a visual arts practitioner based in Malaysia. His research-driven projects are often set in local geographies and concern class aspiration, cultural identity, informal histories, and colonial legacy. By reframing everyday life with irony and wry humour, his works observe the oscillations and assimilations between social classes, the official and the informal, the highbrow and the lowbrow.

He recently completed his one-month fellowship with apexart (NYC, 2024). He participated in the Ilham Art Show 2022 in Kuala Lumpur and was featured in Myth Makers: Spectrosynthesis III in Hong Kong and The Oceans and the Interpreters in Taipei, Dhaka, and Lagos. His solo exhibitions include The World is Your Restaurant (Kuala Lumpur, 2021) and Let Them Eat Salmon (Singapore, 2023). Hoo graduated with a BA in photography from the London College of Communication (2010), and co-founded the Run Amok art collective (2012–17) in George Town.

Guest Speaker
Tēnn Bûn-kî is an independent curator and the founder of the Nusantara Archive Project (established in 2017), which explores the shared history of Taiwan and Southeast Asia, as well as their decolonization processes. His recent research focuses on the cross-cultural representation of plants in Taiwanese literature. He presented the Nusantara Archive Project (archive f) in The Secret South (curated by Nobuo Takamori). His most recent projects include A Sea of Islands at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (April 20 – May 19, 2024), the TFAM Net.Open Project |Commoning 1, and The Southern Linguistics Project, an ongoing collaboration with artists Posak Jodian and Angga Cipta since 2022.