Lingling Lolita is an alter ego I developed during my study abroad in New York City, and aims to answer the internal conflict I have of being proud of my femininity/sexuality and my body as an Asian women.
Lingling lolita is the visual and emotional embodiment of all the harmful of stereotypes that have been expected of Asian women. She plays into her infantilized, erotic, and hypersexual nature to give the audiences exactly what they want. In her interactive strip tease that includes dance, music, video, and poetry, she performs like the perfect ‘China doll’.
Like most asian women growing up in the West, I have been constantly surrounded by the certain expectations, images, and fantasies that western media, film, and politics have created for us. We are constantly portrayed as docile, innocent, yet sexual beings, whom are desirable in the eyes of white men for our exotic appearance and alleged submissive sexuality. We are victims of fetishization by men and women, though unlike white women, our bodies and our sexualities are highly racialized.
I have early memories of being called a “china doll” by relatives and family friends of the time. One of my formative relationships during university was with a white man, who often forced me to adhere to his fantasies of a soft spoken, innocent, and obedient girlfriend. Each day I struggle with being able to accept myself for who I am, and to see past my body’s purely sexual purposes.
It is through this background that the development of LingLing Lolita takes place. In curating what I wanted this alter ego to represent and embody, I illustrated a mindmap comprised of key terms and phrases that I felt succinctly captured these experiences.
I soon found that what I wanted to communicate most with my alter ego, is that she is angry. She is frustrated with the narrative that has been written for her and is seeking revenge. She is unapologetically intimidating, frightening, and even grotesque. At the same time, she knows how she is perceived as a sexual, exotic, doll, and she decides to play into that, shocking audiences so that they might become aware of their own indecency.
After developing the personality of my ego, I began formulating what she would look like. First and foremost, taking inspiration from the notion of the ‘china doll’, I was inspired by the lolita aesthetics that are popular worldwide in which girls dress up like dolls and often linked with various fetish and kink cultures.
However, I did not want her to just be a generic doll that could be found anywhere. She needed some aspect to her costume that was painstakingly Chinese, undeniably exotic, and entirely orientalist. Hence, I drew inspiration from the costumes of traditional Chinese opera, including jewelry, makeup, and headwear. I also drew from the costume of Shanghainese cinema stars of the 1930s and 40s, who were often portrayed as sexy, high class women in tight qipaos, oiled updos, and pear chokers.
Opera costume adapted from ‘Farewell my Concubine’
20th century Shanghainese film poster