Blissfully Yours

(2014)

Here’s a good example of a piece that would likely never be published today, now that Xi Jinping has succeeded in ruining everything that was once great about China. Originally commissioned by LEAP, the country’s main (or at least best) contemporary art magazine, the topic at the time was relatively unexplored—queerness in (East/Southeast) Asian cinema—and has since become fodder for numerous dissertations, monographs, and film programs. Which is not to say it’s an exhaustive survey; rather, I opted to focus on three filmmakers whose work—more than ten years later—has proven to endure the test of time, I’m happy to say.

I.

There are places we end up when we don’t really belong anywhere else. This sense of not-belonging, it is naturally felt by those existing on the fringes of society. There of course is no “outside” outside of perception, and how one perceives oneself relating to the whole can elicit a sense of cagedness far worse than actual incarceration. It is a feeling that Kim Kyung Mook deeply identifies with. Dropping out of school at the age of 16, Kim moved to Seoul, where he began a career as a journalist. Like a lot of gay teenagers, he began meeting strangers, older men he’d contacted over the Internet, for sex. This has as much to do with a desire for escape as it does with a need to fulfill a sexual impulse—perhaps even more so. To exit the world via another’s body: a temporary release from the more draining and depressive banalities that constitute the day-to-day. Although money may be occasionally exchanged, it is not about necessity, livelihood; rather, exchange becomes part of the escapism built into the transaction. (It also allows for a sort of release from engagement in any emotional economy; the older man is thus enabled to remain faceless—to maintain some anonymity and withstand any feelings of guilt from the limited ability of his engagement with the younger man.) As is, in the case of Kim, the record. For he had a need to document each encounter, either in the form of a video, a written description in his diary, or, at the very least, an imprint in his memory.