Mulan is a VR installation that explores gender, the plasticity and plurality of the body stimulated by discoveries in Chinese folktale, marine biology, and the virtual world. Mulan is a Chinese legendary folk heroine. According to legend, Mulan disguises her identity in order to take her elderly father’s place in the army. Later, Mulan is honored by the emperor, but declines high office position offered by the emperor, and returns to her hometown where she reveals her gender.

This work is inspired by nudibranch. Nudibranchs are colorful hermaphroditic organisms that live in the deep ocean. While many plants and animals use color to attract mates, the nudibranch’s colors are a warning: don’t come close; I am poison. I’m intrigued by nudibranchs and their extraordinary colors, striking forms, unique defense, and ambiguous gender identities; they have become a new inspiration for my ongoing research on feminism.

This work draws from performance tradition. I use 3D VR tools to build an imaginary underwater fantasy world where Mulan and nudibranch co-exist and become one. Wearing a colorful Beijing Opera costume and staging herself on a large rainbow nudibranch, Mulan reveals her true identity as the double, which represents gender and body pluralities contained in one person. With their body connecting with the nudibranch, Mulan becomes not only a hybrid being, a symbiosis, but also part of marine ecosystems.

Beijing Opera, often regarded as a male -dominated performance, has a long history of male actors playing female roles. Through positioning Mulan in Beijing Opera style, Mulan challenges sexism and gender inequality in theater tradition. Mulan’s gesture in the VR also refers to Marina Abramovic’s Rest Energy (1980), where Abramovic holds a bow and her performance partner Ulay holds the bow’s string with an arrow pointing at Abramovic’s chest. Tension and balance, danger and trust, male and female, two are seemingly opposite but interrelate and depend on each other.

Through performative gestures and expressions, I re-interpret Mulan from a feminist perspective. This work also raises questions about the binary system, about how to merge the boundaries of self/other, culture/nature, and human/animal, creating a new social relation that supports different ways of living and diverse beings in order to sustain and survive.

Mulan is presented at Times Square, NYC, on 95 large billboard digital screens from 41 to 49 street, August 1 -31, 2024, as part of Midnight Moment Project. For more about “Mulan” at Times Square Art, please visit here.

Mulan is often exhibited with my performance photograph Reconnection