Whitewashed Bakla in the Presence of the Rice Queen

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(Triptych)

Digital Collage Print

2017

This 8 feet high and 4 feet wide digital collage combines images of gay porn, the artists portrait, butterflies that are indigenous from the Philippines, Filipino whitewashing products, and westernized tanning products. I comment on diasporic issues of queer colours, pointing to the subjugation of difference in order to belong, and evoking the act of skin cut-outs, the ornamental representation of the Filipino queer identities, and what we transform ourselves into to fit in this state of Homonormative, Homonationalist representations and longings. The hybrid paper costume of the Rice Queen are templates from Spanish Queens during the Colonization of the Philippines in the 16th Century. The dress is encrusted and bedazzled by homonormative queer bodies from gay magazines, with its Asian influence of the demon mask that adorn my face digitally. Surrounding the figures are decorated with whitewashing products found in the Philippines, with butterflies’ templates indigenous to the Philippines crafted from Homonormative gay porn bodies. The two Indigenous figures I inhabit are a blend of Ifugao, Igorot, and Ilocano attire that are Indigenous to the Philippines as well, crafted with the same queerious paper butterfly motifs. This idea of transforming between the colonized and colonizer relocates my embodiment of struggles between states of oppression and the transition between two spaces of homeland and colonized space.