ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, photographer Tseng Kwong Chi embarked on his role as the self-declared “Ambiguous Ambassador,” right before the AIDS epidemic (the disease that killed him in 1990) was first officially reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a gay Asian-American man, Tseng was a trailblazer in many different ways, famously as a Chinese performance artist who masqueraded in a signature grey Mao suit and staged his self-portraits in iconic landscapes. Wearing his Communist persona like a constructed façade, Tseng was not from China but was born in British Hong Kong, and he lived and studied in Vancouver, BC and Paris before settling into his professional life as a New York-based artist. Although Tseng has recently been given attention for his membership in the New York school of artists, his embodied contributions to Chinese-American gender politics remain unexamined—particularly in relation to the debate at the time involving the implication of Chinese-American feminism in the de-masculinisation of Chinese men. Through photography, Tseng performs a transgressive sexual politics by documenting a uniquely transnational vision, not only through artistic practices, but through works that acknowledge transcultural feminist discourses and translational critical debates. These different contexts pertained to Chinese-American identity in conflict with Marxist figurations of China during the late 1970s. According to Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, the asymmetries of global identities are inherent to the transnational development of feminisms: the “globalized framework of encounter and exchange” in today's power relations is “connected to inequalities that result from earlier forms of globalization”. Thus, the “trans” for theorising transnational studies of sexuality takes into account the circulation of identities no differently than the flow of goods and people in global capitalism.
