Jamie Shi & Phạm Nguyễn Anh Tú
14.3.–13.4.2025
Opening Thursday 13.3. at 5–7 pm.
Titanik
Itäinen Rantakatu 8
20700 Turku, Finland
In Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, a Japanese woman falls in love, marries an American naval officer and is ultimately abandoned, resulting in taking her own life as a final act of sacrifice. 84 years later, David Henry Hwang wrote M. Butterfly, a play featuring the story of a French diplomat who falls in love with a Chinese opera singer who turned out to be both a man and a spy, culminating in the French man’s downfall in self-delusion.
In M. Dragonfly, queer duo Jamie Shi and Nguyễn Anh Tú Pham expand on an iconic opera through fragmented storytelling and improvisation. The unfolding of this story begins with a close-up shot of a part of a body. The skin is still in its non-whiteness, and a laser machine violently disrupts its non-movement. An uncanniness follows after, embodied within the characters’ robotic movements and anime-like physique, perhaps as an ode to the perfection of an AI-generated human model. As the film endures its innate glitching, we watch the characters transform into comedic avatars moving through scenes in abjection. The scenes transition quickly, similar to TikTok’s FYP, providing just enough content to move on. Experience of displacements blends locations seamlessly resulting in subtle placelessness.
M. Dragonfly is an artistic attempt to trace the outlines of the West’s influence in contemporary pop culture and is also a retrospection of its implicit soft power in shaping global cultural perceptions. It highlights the performative nature of identity and its ongoing negotiation in everyday life. It disidentifies through submission to the weight of its dated reference and resistance through flamboyant exaggerations and digital alienations. The disjointed and seemingly unrelated imagery induces a cognitive surrender—one that numbs yet lingers with a quiet, almost obscene melancholy.
Rhizomatically working as a queer duo, Frankfurt-based artists Shi (b.1995, China) and Pham (b.1997, Vietnam) connect global Asian diasporic voices, highlighting the importance of nomadic collectives, interdependence and decentralised mode of production as strategies of resistance to singular straight narratives.
Independently, they have both exhibited in New York, London, and Berlin; M. Dragonfly is their first duo exhibition in Finland.
— Words by Augustine Paredes
The project is supported by Digitale Perspektiven, Germany and the Finnland Institute.
Jamie Shi (b.1995, China; they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Frankfurt am Main/NYC, their practice focuses on capturing queer subjectivity in hidden collective (un)consciousness. Driven by research of literary and performance analysis, Jamie’s works subvert the boundary between reality and manufactured perceptions, creating fictional scenarios via reconstructing surrealist moments of glitch and spectral. Their works haven been shown in various institutions, such as the Sothey’s NYC; Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.
Phạm Nguyễn Anh Tú (b. 1997, Vietnam; he/him) is a visual artist born and raised in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam. He approaches video making through combinations of animated collages and chroma key compositing to recreate scenes of personal memories, fantasy and inner dialogue. He is interested using art as a site for experimenting and critically reflecting, to grasp the systems of knowledge that structure our world. His works have been shown internationally at The British Museum, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 4th Thai Short Film and Video Festival, Stuttgart Film Winter, Kassel Dokfest, New Mexico Experiments in Cinema International Film Festival.