Dorcas Tang 邓佳颖 : Love Me Long Time
Exhibition artist: Dorcas Tang
Curator: Reina Takeuchi
SYDNEY, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: 25 February 2023 - 09 April 2023
Love Me Long Time deepens Dorcas Tang’s existing audiovisual project examining overlapping themes of desire, intimacy, and Asian identity through portraits of and oral interviews with Asian diasporic and Asian Australian women and nonbinary people.
The work invites conversations about joy and pleasure while reflecting on the ongoing legacies of gendered, anti-Asian violence in a white supremacist society. Love Me Long Time recasts those often depicted as flattened tropes as active subjects, rewriting their own narratives of desire. Instead of resolute answers, the project offers an impermanent archive, where Asian women and nonbinary people are free to hold their own ambiguous truths.
The exhibition restructures contemporary art exhibitions as sites of mutual support and learning through intimate panel talks, reading groups, and educational programming. Through a practice fueled by participatory engagement and reciprocity of care, Dorcas invites discussions around intimacy and loss, exemplifying bonds within the Asian community.
Dorcas Tang 邓佳颖 : Love Me Long Time is supported by Create NSW Small Project Grants (Quick Response) and the Pride Foundation's Small Grants Program.
Artist biography:
Dorcas Tang 邓佳颖 (she/they) is a third-generation Chinese-Malaysian photographer and artist working, thinking, and playing on unceded Gadigal land. She is interested in the crucial intersections of photography, history, and archival silences. As a daughter of the Chinese diaspora, at the core of her practice is care for her communities while grappling with the intrinsic violence of the camera and archival practices. Her audiovisual projects include Los Paisanos del Puerto, examining the Chinese diaspora of Costa Rica; Love Me Long Time, exploring desire, intimacy, and Asian identity; and Staging Portraits which looks at queer kinship through facilitating community photo sessions at The Bearded Tit. Ultimately, she seeks to encourage critical dialogue through creating socially engaged visual narratives.
Love Me Long Time Publication available to view digitally here
Image Caption: Aaqila, 22, they/them. Photograph by Dorcas Tang, courtesy the artist.
