Massage Baby!

Massage Baby! is a hybrid documentary-fiction film that begins with the lives and conditions of Chinese female massage workers in New York. The character Coco is performed by the director, Ke Zhang herself. Rather than being based on a single person, Coco emerges from Zhang’s time spent with several Chinese massage women in New York through observation, conversation, and participation, transforming their language, bodily experiences, labor conditions, and emotional traces into a fictional figure.

The film constructs a staged filming situation in which Coco is invited by an English-speaking director to be interviewed and filmed. Since she does not understand English, the exchange takes place mainly through a Mandarin-speaking translator. Coco speaks about work, the body, intimacy, and life in New York, while information about the director’s intentions, judgments, and on-set arrangements surfaces in English, forming another layer of narrative that she cannot fully access.

Moving between interview, street observation, massage room scenes, and bodily performance, the film overlaps lived experience with fiction, Chinese speech with English mediation, and the watched laboring body with the artist’s own performing body. Rather than reconstructing one specific “real person,” Massage Baby! uses Coco as a performed, translated, and filmed figure to question how images produce the subjects they claim to document, and how a female laboring body is interpreted, misunderstood, and reshaped through language, desire, power, and structures of looking.