Jasmin Kent Rodgman’s ‘Instagram opera’ shines a light on tired East Asian stereotypes

When audiences were banished from public spaces, many artists saw an opportunity. ‘Think of it as a new genre,’ suggested the Irish composer Jennifer Walshe. ‘Then it starts to become exciting.’ Though she, and others, had long been exploring the space between organic and digital, now they had little other choice. Suddenly, the value lay in what couldn’t be experienced live.

It is out of this rationale that nineteen ways of looking emerges. Fronted by British-Malaysian composer Jasmin Kent Rodgman, this collaborative project is billed as an ‘Instagram opera’, comprising a series of photos and videos uploaded to the social media platform. Each post is connected to the experiences and (mis)representations of the East Asian diaspora during the pandemic. Cultural history, sound art, dance and spoken word coalesce in what is essentially a remote installation – one mixed in with the daily churn of selfies and targeted advertising.

Of the 66 posts, the most successful are those that confront the irony of using social media to push an anti-racist message. Photographs by Premila van Ommen of beautifully plated, Instagramable offcuts – a pig’s head, trotters, chicken’s feet – take aim at the passive scroller, or food influencers who’ll happily subscribe to an outdated East Asian stereotype. ‘Pangolin Skin, Part Two’, a piece of spoken word written and performed by Dan Tsu, links culinary Orientalism with media conspiracy: ‘They say they cook rats in soup and bats in dumplings. That’s a cataclysmic leap from captive animal to captive audience. Now that’s viral.’

Rodgman manipulates Instagram’s repost feature to similar effect. Donald Trump, who insists on calling Covid-19 the ‘China virus’, appears in a spoof video captioned ‘The Kung-Flu Kid’, originally shared by his son, Don Jr. In it, Trump’s face is superimposed onto the fictional character Daniel LaRusso during the final fight scene from The Karate Kid. LaRusso’s nemesis, Johnny Lawrence, now sports a Chinese flag; his head is a giant, spiked coronavirus protein. The implication is clear. At best, the video pushes a tired, ‘Yellow Peril’ trope. At worse, it’s a tacit invitation to Sinophobic hate crime. Placed within the context of Rodgman’s collage, Trump’s dog-whistle politics are laid painfully bare; the East-West dichotomy begins to unravel.

nineteen ways of looking is equally concerned with diasporic perceptions of the ‘homeland’. In ‘Healthism’, for example, we hear five anecdotes from Chinese citizens, complied by librettist Si’an Chen. Each speaks of a paranoid community atmosphere aggravated by the state’s tough response to the pandemic: ‘Your QR code is your status and some things are not easily forgotten,’ says one. To this, Rodgman adds a sinister patchwork of sound: dripping water, distorted Chinese percussion and monosyllabic jabs from countertenor Keith Pun, all wrapped up in a cavernous reverb. Choreographer Si Rawlinson’s feverish, dislocated movement provides a hypnotic focal point. The combined effect is both disorienting and disturbing, begging the question: is this how Rodgman and the others see China?

Tension with Black Lives Matter is also an intermittent theme. In ‘We Can Be Quiet’, filmed in one take on a deserted London street, Rawlinson riffs on his complex relationship with the movement: ‘Asian privilege is to say that BLM is a black and white issue,’ he suggests. ‘I felt like protesting – but I can still afford Netflix.’ Rawlinson pits guilty indifference against resentment of racial hierarchy – and fear of a movement that threatens his delicately balanced position within that hierarchy. It’s refreshing to see the BLM narrative reexamined in this way. Again, Rodgman delivers a fresh ‘way of looking’ in a world too-often painted in black and white.

Although the project is consistently illuminating, its delivery is not without cliché. Three videos, each called ‘Isolation’, depict locked-down 20-somethings staring mournfully out of windows. One walks through an empty park, past a still-moving set of swings. You can imagine someone nudging the swings just before shot: ‘This will look dystopian!’ There is also a frustrating inconsistency in the quality of video production. One of the project’s eccentricities – or gimmicks, depending on how you see it – is that it is shot entirely on camera phones. Fine, but when the sumptuously lit ‘Healthism’ is plonked alongside the garish, badly lip synced ‘Pangolin Skin’, any aesthetic continuity goes out the window. Though not nearly as thought-provoking, Oliver Zeffman’s Eight Songs from Isolation (also shot entirely on cameraphones over lockdown) avoids both of these pitfalls.

One last thought. I’ve already mentioned the G-word. But is an ‘Instagram opera’ a gimmick too? Maybe not. Rodgman’s work will, presumably, exist until the platform is shut down. And therein lies the point: as long as we have the tools to warp our perception of one another, we’ll need artists like Rodgman to reflect the bias back at us.