Massage Baby!

Massage Baby! is a two-channel video in which the artist performs “Coco, ” a Chinese female massage worker. Built through improvisation, the work emerges from real encounters and translates dialogue, observation, and bodily proximity into a staged, unstable present. One channel holds Coco in interview and direct gaze; the other drifts through street footage, workspaces, and dreamlike sequences, where documentary traces and constructed scenes bleed into each other. What appears as record gradually becomes reconstruction—an image of “her” formed through repetition, projection, and eroded distance. Set within the intimate yet semi-public space of massage labor—where touch, money, and spectatorship intertwine—the work asks what remains when a female body is read as both labor and image. Massage Baby! is not a portrait or a direct critique, but a test of looking: in trying to document “her, ” the artist confronts how memory and desire rewrite what is seen. As she becomes “her, ” the boundary between observer and subject loosens, leaving a parallel figure suspended between fact and invention.