In Chinese opera all characters, including the males, have to be elegant and pretty: the makeup defines light and shadow and is white and pink the face is not pointy. In Western images of divinity, the depiction of masculinity (and power) is muscular and angular. In China, in the traditional opera context, cross-dressing has a long history and does not directly reference sexuality-males playing female roles/females playing male roles-but has a completely different aesthetic.

I had to find a personal or cultural connection. I also wore a mustache, but I didn’t connect with the way they were dealing with it. The makeup, what’s highlighted or not, is quite racialized because most of it tries to recreate the figure of the white man, and to embody physical masculinity in a theatrical way through breast-binding, muscle drawing and mustache referencing. How the Western drag king dealt with the face, figure and body was quite distant from me. I had known drag king culture existed there since the last century, and I wanted to engage it and find my own way. I researched drag king culture in the West. It was in early 2016 when Evan, one of my queer friends on the course, invited me to try something drag. When I moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, I struggled to bring my queerness into my work, and to transform it from an activist to an artistic form of communication. I was an LGBTQ and feminist activist in China.

Chinese opera drag