Can’t wait to see you shine
I spend a lot of time wondering what would be revealed to me if I knew my motherland better. No matter how many times I visit, I’m left longing. When I look outside my granny’s window in the North of Ireland, I wonder if Meng Tsung Lee’s silver-lined, glowing strokes would be waiting for me if only I could peel off the one grey cloud covering the entire sky.
I think of Meng inside his mother; a small seed of a sun waiting to reveal what’s beyond and below. I think of myself once inside my own mother. Pink and wet and wanting. Meng’s work doesn’t skim the surface, it skins it, to reveal what can’t wait to burst forth. Can you feel them within you too?
At the peak of my dysphoria I have to imagine I don’t have a body at all. I close my eyes and imagine I am a star. Not the type with a point or spikes, but a swirling ball of light.
To ‘airbrush’ colloquially means to represent something as more beautiful than it is in reality. Often to airbrush means to rid one of flaws, such as blemishes or stretch marks, by blurring them with a soft brush. In this way, softness can hide what we don’t want to shine.
But to imagine myself as disembodied and shining is a way to touch myself, to live with myself. To bear knowing I am not your son but only a sum of some of your softest parts. Does that mean that when I shine part of you is lit up too? Can you feel my warmth from inside you still?
For Meng, to airbrush is to use air as a medium. Just as intrinsic as the paint and the artist wielding both.
Airbrushing is the process by which liquid paint is atomised into a fine, malleable mist. A star contains less than 2% oxygen, whereas a body contains around 65%. Often a star shines because it has collapsed beneath its own gravity. The best we can hope for is ‘Hydrostatic Equilibrium’, which is a miraculous state where the outward pressure matches the star’s inner pressure perfectly, keeping the star stable and shining.
A core concept in Tao philosophy is Wu Wei (無為), which translates to non-action or effortless action. The art of airbrushing is also a mastering of inner and outer pressure; to paint with compressed air requires a flow state, fluid and freehand. What would it mean for the meaning to be play? What could the point of action be without endless striving? I discover that queer in Manderin is kù’ér (酷儿), which in literal translation means ‘cool kids’.
Meng’s artist tag is ‘LazyWilly,’ which he once explained in an interview by saying he used to draw lots of dicks and that he discovered the word Lazy and thought it sounded funny. Is it queer to find a word that is often used as derogatory and identify with it? Is it the mark of an immigrant to discover words?
I found that in Irish, ‘Tóg go bog é’, is what you say when you want to tell someone to “take it easy” but the literal translation is:
tóg (take) / go bog (softly) / é (it)
Bog in Irish means to soften, just how a bog is a field softened by water. In my mother’s lost language, to take it easy means to let yourself soften like the land.
At the peak of my gender euphoria I soften and spike with a glimmer like love, which Meng’s art tells us is “made of strawberry chocolate fudge.” What would it be like for my sharp edges to be as gooey as my insides? My euphoria answers by rolling my sweet fudgey body beyond the horizon to let me spill over into the glowing unknown. There, in the soft boggy bit, I dance with the cool kids.
And we are endless.
And the wait was worth it.
And our edges are sharp yet soft like a halo.
Catalogue essay by Róisín Maeve (they/them)
