On the Wednesday, 19th of November, I gave an academic talk —titled Swedish Racist Love and Queer Asian Mythmaking— as part of the amazing Crip & Queer seminar series in the division of Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden. After my lecture, we had an hour Q&A session and much more interesting conversations ensured well after the allotted seminar time during the fika.

I close read Lap-See Lam’s The Altersea Opera and thought through discourses around Chinese restaurants and politics of Asian racial aesthetics. It was also my first time dubbing in Nordic racial politics after finally having become able to read in Swedish. There were some interesting points to extend and expand upon Asian American and other Asian ethnic studies, but also to consider with different manifestations, historical contexts, and cultural norms around race-related speech in the Nordics. Below is the circulated abstract of the talk:

How can we locate Asia in the Nordics? With Lap-See Lam’s film installation The Altersea Opera — a 2024 representative of the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — I reflect on the cultural making of Asianness in a Nordic context and its queer politics. Asian artists from the Nordic region and beyond collaborated to create a diasporic tale of Asia, at once tangible yet sensually fantastical. Thinking through spaces such as Drottningsholm’s Kina Slott and Sweden’s first Chinese restaurants, enduring fascination towards Asia often survives critiques against its fallacy, where myths of authenticity fuel desire instead of frustrating it. Instead, Lam’s artwork presents a queer tale of Asian Nordics, defying compulsions to locate where Asia is — whether within its geographic borders or in racialized bodies — in order to navigate how Asia operates through the tensions between the real and the mythical.

You can read more about the event here: https://www.soc.lu.se/en/calendar/performing-asia-nordic-sea-and-queerness-its-tensions