I made this project to explore the idea of fan art and the social meaning related to fan art. The fan-art making process is an active loop of reorganizing elements of the character, recontextualizing characters, placing characters in other contexts and other universes.
In this process, characters lose some of their original characteristics but gain new interpretations resulting in a character that is somehow separate from the original one. Fan-art is a process of transforming an object or character into an object of desire.
Through fan-art, an artist is able to transgress, play or pursue pleasure without restraint. In this project, I seek to address the plasticity of fan-art itself and the plastic desire of fan art artists.
As a fan artist myself, I understand the desire to escape from reality, to go to an idealized world, to invest our hopes in something else, to put desires on these characters. Characters provide a way to communicate and express oneself, characters provide a layer of protection.
Fan-art expresses why one likes a character, one’s relation to the character, and (to a certain extent) one’s own character. At the same time, one is ironically distant from his or her own desire, which is objectified, projected, and visualized in the fan-art that’s created.
Fan-art can thus be used to empathetically express deeply personal, intimate, and even transgressive emotions in networks of mutual exposure and vulnerability. In this performance, I act as a fan-art artist and viewers act as fans.
