This presentation explores the possibilities of asexual aesthetics as a curatorial framework in rethinking the erotic legibility of Asian moving image practices. Building upon my ongoing research on surrealist eroticism and the politics of asexuality, I focus on the shift from Euro-American theories of transgressive eroticism, particularly Bataille’s concept of sovereignty through excess, towards forms of refusal, absence, and non-productive expenditure in contemporary Asian video works. While erotic transgression has historically been framed as a mode of liberation, I argue that asexuality, when deployed as a critical lens rather than a fixed identity, offers a radically different logic, one that resists the normative demand for desire, affect, and productivity in curatorial discourse.
This framework will be articulated through a comparative analysis of Daisies (1966, Věra Chytilová) and three contemporary works from artists rooted in East and Southeast Asia: Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia (2016–), Anchi Lin’s Pswagi Temahahoi (2022), and Mooni Perry’s Binlang Xishi (2021). Alongside my curatorial projects presenting each of video works, these artists will be also introduced with vegetal sensuality, failed eroticism, and gendered labor through aesthetics of excess, stillness, or detachment.
This paper contributes to the conversation on decolonizing Asian film curation by challenging erotics-centered frameworks that dominate both mainstream programming and avant-garde traditions. It further considers how curatorial practices can foreground non- legible, non-performing bodies without defaulting to invisibility or erasure. By bridging asexual theory, surrealist critique, and contemporary Asian video practices, this presentation aims to open new directions for curatorial work—especially within feminist, queer, and Indigenous Asian contexts—that resist colonial spectacle, neoliberal visibility, and dominant modes of erotic circulation.
Bio
Eunha Chang is a curator, writer, Fulbright Scholar and PhD student in Art History at Binghamton University. She holds an MA with distinction in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. Chang navigates the interstices of human and non-human, analog and digital, and embodied and mediated, making exhibitions and writings that linger in the in-between. Her recent exhibition, The Internet Barnacles (2025, G Gallery, Seoul), reimagines digital space and their users through Plato’s allegory of sea-god Glaucus. Through curatorial projects like Sad Captions(2024, Seoul Museum of Art), Squish! In the Forest (2024, Insa Art Space, Seoul), and Autophagy (2022–2023, de Appel, Amsterdam), she has explored themes of queerness, intimacy, sovereignty, and ecological discourse. She has been awarded from Arts Council Korea, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange and has a forthcoming publication titled Post-sexual Futures: Towards Queer Non-humanisms supported by the council.