Faux Meat

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In Progress | Collaboration with Tianming Zhou

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This project centers around two nude male performers engaging in a series of ritualistic actions with faux plants and their bodies within a forest. 

 

Initially, they search for each other, interacting anxiously with nature. Their unease dissipates when they meet in front of faux plants in the forest’s center. Here, they perform a series of symbolic actions: holding the faux plants, cleaning them, trimming the branches and leaves as if they were real, and planting them in the earth. The second performer then uses a straight-edge razor to trim hair growing on a birthmark on the first performer's buttock, brushes his body with water, and positions him to face the sunlight. The ritual concludes with the first performer being buried in the earth, mirroring the burial of the faux plants.

 

Faux plants, synthetic imitations of real flora, fascinates me a lot as it echoes the complex reality of queer existence in modern society. Despite their durability and convenience, faux plants embody unfulfilled desires. Its visual proximity to real natural plants, where the value of faux plants is registered, is oftentimes betrayed by its plastic texture and materiality, ending up as an alternative existence. I see such poignancy in a queer body striving to conform to societal norms but ultimately remaining marginalized.

 

In the film, both the faux plants and the performers’ bodies are positioned within power structures of planting and being planted, eventually becoming what I term “faux meat”—an existence reduced to its bare, organic components. The first performer’s body, marked by dark birthmarks, defies the idealized queer body aesthetic and stands in contrast to society’s expectations of a perfect physique. Like faux plants, these bodies are scrutinized and marginalized for deviating from an accepted standard, transforming from living entities into mere “meat.”