Pride Month: Mengwen Cao
05/04/2020, s2e1, delight © Mengwen Cao
Written by Claire Ping
The past year has been, for many, a prolonged struggle to keep life intact and experience joy in the absence of familiar comforts and regular social contact. Taking the opportunity to look inward, photographer and artist Mengwen Cao explored image creation as a way to reconnect with themselves through a tender gaze. The result is Playground Radio, which Cao describes as a “self-preservation project” undertaken during the pandemic. Appearing playful and quotidian at first glance, the series is both an intimate conversation with complex layers of identity and subtle resistance to the moment’s disquieting socio-political climate.
A queer migrant raised in China and based currently in New York, Cao is no stranger to occupying multiple intersecting identities that are conventionally marked as marginalized. Despite their familiarity with the burden (and occasionally empowering potential) of labels, the previous months were especially difficult to live through as an unreasonable wave of discrimination against the Asian community swept across the globe. Refusing to counter hate with more negativity, Cao turned instead to nurture compassion through cultivating love and appreciation for themselves.
04/09/2020, s1e3, nova © Mengwen Cao
12/08/2020, s2e7, compassion © Mengwen Cao
“I refuse to internalize the hate placed on me and my community,” announced the artist in an earlier media article, “I will keep planting seeds of care and love.”
Taking the form of a visual diary, Playground Radio consists primarily of self-portraits framed by vibrantly coloured strips in the style of polaroid photos. Scribbles and sketches run along the borders and often spill onto the pictures, resembling dialogue bubbles that document the artist’s mood or pay tribute to a discovery of the day. Ranging from spontaneous thoughts in Nova to the lyrics of Mandarin pop songs in Compassion, they represent an effort to reclaim the multiplicity of Cao’s ever-evolving existence and their varied cultural influences.
04/08/2020, s1e2, cryptic © Mengwen Cao
05/06/2020, s2e2, perfect © Mengwen Cao
On Instagram, works such as Cryptic and Perfect are accompanied by moving images that give insight to Cao’s process. Viewers are able to watch as words and shapes are added or erased over the photograph, gradually filling its surface. The pictures become, in a sense, a mental playground in which the artist finds safety to chat with and express themselves. Each marked with the date, time, and name of a song, they form silent radio broadcasts – distilled into images – through which Cao plays with the possibility of extending warmth and gentle sentiments uncovered from an inward search to an audience beyond the digital screen. Though created in solitude, the series may be read as a continuation of Cao’s earlier projects that involve queer or diasporic communities with whom the artist shares parts of their identities.
03/0202021, s3e1, composition © Mengwen Cao
In one particularly striking image from the group, Composition, Cao photographs themselves in the mirror with a phone camera. While their facial expression is hidden from view, a relaxed and forward-leaning posture suggests confidence. With the words “WHAT’S YOUR PROGRAM OF PLEASURES?” boldly scribbled across the top and right of the image, Cao seems to be inviting viewers into a similar journey of self-discovery in order to reclaim and cherish an autonomous inner world that resists facial categorization.
