Zihan Loo

Phinally Done. 80 months. 😮‍💨 Introduction + 5 chapters + Epilogue. 368 works cited, 196 footnotes, 34 figures, and many late nights. The most common question I get: what is your dissertation about? I am going to try to break it down over a couple of posts. My title is “Etiolated Conduct: More-than-human Performativity with/in Singapore.” I am in Performance Studies, so my introduction establishes the conversation I am having with other theorists in the field. I structured it according to the title, with each term explicated in its own section. I begin with the terms “etiolations” (Austin) and “conduct” (Foucault). Then I take up the “more-than-human” in performance studies (BKG, Roach, Phelan, Schneider, Barad), then the performativity latent in more-than-human studies, particularly in critical infrastructural studies (Larkin, Anand, et al.). “With/in” names my methodology and positionality. “Singapore” engages existing writing on cultural studies (Chua Beng Huat, C.J. Wee W.-L.) and performance theory (Paul Rae, Ray Langenbach) in and on Singapore. I begin by expanding on a piece I wrote for The Substation’s 25th anniversary in 2015, "Within Ourselves: Starting Over." Where I shared the experience of adopting a banyan sapling. I regard its etiolated condition as both metaphor and metonym for cultural production in Singapore. I conclude with Robert Zhao’s 2015 installation at the Substation gallery: a hanging root with powderpost beetles alongside a vitrine of 200kg of sawdust, sanded down from a section of the Malayan banyan he salvaged before its removal. I build on several writers who have engaged comprehensively with the more-than-human with/in Singapore: Comaroff and Ong, Marcus Yee, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Joanne Leow, Charmaine Chua, Natasha Myers, Eng-Beng Lim, and others. Instead of examining horticultural spectacles, I turn to embodied practices of being suspended in a state/State of calibrated livability. Thank you @robert_zhao for letting me engage with your work, albeit as framing rather than the deeper analysis it deserves. Brief captions for photos in comments. More on the body chapters in posts to come...

‘This drive towards sterilisation breeds “ghosts,” everything suggestive of other histories. A formidable presence rears up here, it rushes out of control, and it dissipates. It cannot be forgotten but must not be mentioned.’ - @deadfishlongkang 🍂 On 27 February 2008, Mas Selamat Kastari escaped from Whitley Road Detention Centre, where he had been held for two years under the ISA. He climbed through a bathroom window, scaled the perimeter fence, and vanished. The most popular theory traces his route through the drainage network, a system of 'longkangs,' channeling runoff from the central catchment to the reclaimed shorelines. A year-long manhunt followed. He was arrested in Johor and repatriated. In 2011, Charles Lim premiered ‘All Lines Flow Out' at the @sgbiennale : a twenty-one-minute video on loop alongside two bulbous drainage socks suspended from the ceiling, packed with dried leaves and debris. Chapter 5/5, ‘Containment and Contingency,' reads the film as dwelling in the affective conditions of drainage infrastructure that made escape imaginable, holding open the opaque fugitivity the State's security apparatus could neither apprehend nor resolve. I read 4 moments from the film: 1. A human figure appearing as debris walking through the canals. 2. A white substance leaking from a figure in the canal, staining the waterway opaque. 3. An interlude at the Cashin House, a colonial-era residence built over concrete pilings near Lim Chu Kang. 4. The sound design by @zai.tangent and editing that engage recursion and temporal loops. Through these close readings, I approach a way of theorizing etiolated conduct that does not merely extend from a human agential capacity. I consider withdrawal, contingency, leaks, and more-than-human presence: what Fred Moten calls a ‘re/con/figuring of the milieu' and a resistance of the object/subject/thing. This is 'etiolated conduct' at its most unpragmatic and opaque limit, a withdrawal of presencing, what Pheng Cheah via Derrida describes as temporalization as worlding. I return to the Introduction's poetics of infrastructure (Larkin), reading the film as a sensing of othered worlds. 📷 @singaporeartmuseum @boonscafe

‘When solitude became so extreme that the appearance of an ant could cause great joy and comfort, my perception of life underwent a paradigmatic change.' Kuo Pao Kun, post-detention, in an interview with Janadas Devan. Chapter 4, ‘Solitary-Solidarity: More-than-human Parrhesia and Trans-generational Conduct,' was the second chapter I wrote, informed by a graduate seminar with Wendy Brown. The seed came from @seelan.palay 's 2017-18 year-long performance ‘32 Years: The Interrogation of a Mirror,' and from working on ‘Gemuk Girls' with @thenecessarystage . Seelan was arrested outside Parliament House for commemorating Dr. Chia Thye Poh, whose freedom was restricted for 32 years under the ISA. Fined SGD2,500, he chose 14 days in lieu. He refused a blood test on intake and was placed in solitary confinement, conditions akin to those endured by political detainees. He was assigned no. 5153. On the 6th day, as part of his ongoing performance, he peels the orange from his prison meal and consumes it sac by sac. As time trickles away, 5153 wonders where he stops and where the orange begins, an etiolated conduct under what Lisa Guenther calls ‘de-animalization.' I compare Seelan's gesture to testimonials from political detainees (Poh Soo Kai, Said Zahari, Teo @sohlung , KC Chew, Chng Suan Tze) who reflect on creatures sharing carceral architecture, especially at Whitley Detention Center near the central catchment area, where detainees cultivated relations with toads, ants, lizards, birds. I also reflect on aesthetic practice after release, specifically Kuo Pao Kun's ‘0Zero01,' structured around the salmon's reproductive cycle. The chapter engages parrhesia from Foucault's 1983 Berkeley lectures, the courage to speak truth to power. I encountered the lectures as audio recordings at the @bancroftlibrary , listening past felicitous utterances to gaps, silences, unanswered questions. I read this alongside Spivak: what if the subaltern cannot speak truth to power? We approach what Puar and Eng call an objectless critique, beyond sexuality as identity, toward infrastructures and distribution of capacities. I close by returning to Palay's installation ‘32 Years + 14 Days.'

‘I kept sinking and I thought to myself: I am only 16 and I am going to die here in my school uniform!' While working on a (still incomplete) documentary about Tanjong Rhu, I collected memories from men who visited before and after the police entrapment exercises of the 1990s. One thing became clear - a strange ecological intimacy was common with these memories. Vivid descriptions of lallang, casuarinas, water bottles on rocky revetments. Chapter 3/5, ‘Reclaiming Reclamation: Ecological Intimacy at Tanjong Rhu,' attends to the materiality of reclaimed shorelines of cruising, sinking into the land alongside two artworks. 1. @otto_fong 's ‘Cetacea,' staged in 1993 by @tworkssg directed by @lim.yubeng , starring @limhowngean ; restaged as 鲸 in Mandarin in 1994 by @drama_box_ , directed by Jackie Liu, starring @dannyyeo_yangjunwei It stages interspecies intimacy between a beached whale and a boy at Fort Road, a surrogate for kinship and love: brothers, lovers, etc. 2. @boojunfeng 's 2009 short film ‘Tanjong Rhu' foregrounds the ecology of reclaimed land so vividly that an audience member described how it brought him back to the site. I draw on recent value-form and ecological Marxist feminist scholarship reconfiguring historical materialism to think the imbrication of land, capital, property, subsumption, and social reproduction. I read cruising, like aesthetic production, as activity with ‘no value,' the sensuous reproductive activity capital requires and banishes (Scholz's value-dissociation, Hennessey's outlawed needs, De'Ath, Battistoni). This is the critical hinge of the dissertation, shaped by conversations with my committee member Colleen Lye. I build on existing conversations of Marxism and performance studies. I claim that Singapore's post-independence history has produced a lacuna around Marxism, a blind spot our political economy is defined against but understands little of. I close by returning to Tanjong Rhu in 2026: settling land, migrant worker shelters, sand piles, the Founders' Memorial. I return to ‘value,' critiquing how it has been laundered of critical content, returned as civic vocabulary in our 1991 ‘Shared Values'.

Have you seen this artwork at Mountbatten MRT station? Whenever I visited @nacsingapore , I will encounter Jason Wee's ‘Lord Mountbatten Thinks of Pink' (2010) and wondered about it. Chapter 2/5, ‘Camouflaged Choreographies: The Public Secrets of Jason Wee's Practice,' reads several of @jasewee 's works that spans a decade for the choreography he performs with the act of gay cruising. Building on the diagram from Chp. 1, I argue that ‘camouflaged choreographies' are what artists in Singapore perform (what @alvinecessary calls dancing within a very tight space). We tread the boundary between transparency and opacity, from 'doing something' to 'being instrumentalized' responding to etiolated conditions cultivated by the State, its agents, and the circulation of capital. I read ‘Lord Mountbatten Thinks of Pink' as the dusty pink naval camouflage Mountbatten devised during WWII, and as an act of camouflage itself, a ‘public secret' hiding in plain sight. I then turn to Jason's recent work, which began as an Exactly Foundation residency titled ‘Commonplace' (2018), shapeshifting into ‘Uncommon Choreographies' (2020-present). These works draw on photos taken at cruising spots, which saw a resurgence during the pandemic's ‘return to nature' phase. Jason works through layers of obfuscation and calibrated opacity to produce what Sianne Ngai names as a visceral abstraction through aesthetics. You might rightly observe: isn't this what queer artists have always done? Yes. But I argue that the State's selective blindness toward its constituents, the refusal to see what is in front of them, is what makes queerness in SG strangely queerer. As Jason puts it, in an email correspondence that informs my study: ‘We are public secrets, we stand in public spaces and without beginning to, without deliberately covering or passing or hiding, are already hidden and passed over and overlooked.' I close by turning to Jason's other practice, the "luxury we cannot afford," reading an excerpt from ‘Walk Walk Only: A Choreography' in his 2026 collection ‘Dance Time.' I ask: What does it mean to expose what is intended to be hidden to the scrutiny of overexposure?

Chapter 1/5 - Beyond Pragmatic Resistance: The ‘Violent Gifts’ of Repeal. 🩷 This chapter grew out of a graduate seminar with Pheng Cheah on biopolitics, and became a presentation in the @academia.sg scholars series. Pheng’s critique reads the human rights framework as “violent gifts” that stabilize power while “producing the identities of their claimants.” The chapter maps a typology of resistance in Singapore. I review scholarship on illiberal pragmatism (Audrey Yue) and pragmatic resistance (Lynette Chua), alongside recent queer scholarship by Natalie Oswin and Pavan Mano that asks for a more capacious theorization of how resistance might appear, and what rights-based recognition means for the queer community. I then propose a diagram mapping resistance along two axes: pragmatic to unpragmatic (drawing on Austin’s felicitous conditions for performative utterances), and transparent to opaque (spectacular and visible to unspectacular and illegible). The dissertation traces an arc from one corner to its opposite. Etiolated conduct occupies the unpragmatic-opaque quadrant (fig. 2). This chapter stays in the pragmatic-transparent corner. It examines two of the most visible forms of queer resistance: SOGI rights campaigning at the UN Universal Periodic Review, and Pink Dot via the 2012 video “Someday,” directed by @boojunfeng (fig. 3 & 8) Midway through writing, the government repealed Section 377A (fig. 4). The latter half turns to the parliamentary debates, reading MPs’ speeches as what Chua Beng Huat calls “small measures of political theater.” I was drawn to several MPs’ repetition of “the order of things,” citing LKY’s 1962 speech on the PPSO (which became the ISA) I argue that after LKY’s passing, the ruling party has shifted from an authoritarian rule of law (Jothie Rajah) toward a biopolitical rule of order, sustaining a heteronormative order that determines whose lives are sustained or pruned. I close by returning to “Someday,” reading it as already a portrait of conditional living under that order, its vignettes yearning for an acceptance that can never arrive. How might we imagine queer presence beyond the terms arranged for us? Captions ⬇️

Performance documentation from Blood Work🩸Asian American Congealment and Visceral Abstraction CW: 🩸, cutting. 📅 Saturday, 18 April 2026 🕰️ 2:45 - 4pm 📍 Segal Theater, CUNY Graduate Center Part of @queerclassrelations , hosted by @clagsny . Supported by @crgberkeley and @badasiansclub . The piece unfolded across five chapters between two altars. At the Sound Altar, each chapter opened with a foley action, looped and layered into reverberating accumulation. At the Blood Altar, conversations bent the form of the conference panel toward visceral abstraction as practice, strategy, and method. Service performed as acts of care-in-relation. Chapter 1: Zihan and Wu opened with a conversation about talent testing as Wu drew Zihan's 🩸. Chapter 2: Riven and Zihan recounted a rope performance at @folsomstreeteast two years prior, when Zihan fell off the riser and wounded himself, raising the question of what it means for the private to be made public. Chapter 3: Lena and Riven spoke over a bottle of dried 🩸flakes about unwaged reproductive labor while Riven shined Lena’s leather jacket. Chapter 4: Wu and Lena reflected on consent and exchangeable solids while Lena reopened a wound on Wu's back. Chapter 5: Riven and Wu closed with continuous debt, 关系, and the value circulating in domination and submission. Wu shined Riven's boots and drew Riven's 🩸 to be fired with the vessel, a performance object collecting the materials used throughout: 🩸, Huberd's shoe grease, and dried flakes. Excerpt from our abstract: "Marx wrote that capital enters the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Our visceral methodology engaged this sanguine reality through ornamentalism, queer-class intimacies, and the viscerality of the value-form. How has blood been made to work? How do we make blood work?" 🩸 @lenachen 💉 @thebitchempress_ 🪢 @loozihan 🏍️ @transgressrrr 📸 1, 5 by @renal.artery 📸 8 by @laurawestengard 📸 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 by @tranced

Blood Work🩸 Asian American Congealment & Visceral Abstraction - a panel as performance 📅 Saturday, 18 April 2026 🕰️ 2:45 - 4pm 📍 Segal Theater, CUNY Graduate Center How has blood been made to work? How do we make blood work? How do artists navigate the tricky entanglement of desire, intimate labor, and capital through embodied practice? What happens when our imaginations of Asian American relational practices expand beyond gestures of care, sustenance, and provision to include wounding, withholding, and overpowering? This performance intervenes in the form of a conference panel to unpack racialized queer and economic relations. We examine how bodyworkers capitalize on (and are capitalized by) ornamentalism, a body both adorned and undone by blood’s viscosity. Through agonism and antagonism, we explore visceral abstraction as practice, strategy, and method. A relational understanding of thingliness enables us to glimpse forms of queer-class intimacies. We share our praxis through documentation and ritual actions to unpack our relationship to orientalism, objectification, and queer-class solidarity. part of @queerclassrelations hosted by @clagsny Register at 🔗 queerclassrelations.commons.gc.cuny.edu Supported by @crgberkeley & @badasiansclub 🩸@lenachen 💉@thebitchempress_ 🪢 @loozihan 🏍️ @transgressrrr 📷 @molly.baber

If you're in NYC next week, I'm participating in NYU's Center for Research & Study Graduate Student Conference co-organized by the students at the departments of Performance Studies, Cinema Studies and Art and Public Policy. I'll be delivering the final chapter of my dissertation on @deadfishlongkang Charles Lim's all the lines flow out / All Lines Flow Out (2011). This will be the first public presentation of this chapter, titled "Containment and Contingency: Charles Lim's 'all the lines flow out' and Inhuman Worlding". I talk about Singapore's drainage infrastructure, more-than-human entanglement, and the speculative 2008 escape of Mas Selamat from indefinite detention via the very waterways the film documents. I am on the first panel on Friday April 3rd Morning from 9.45 to 11.15am at NYU PS Room 612. Follow the QR code on the last slide for the link. My panel is titled 'Shifting Shorelines' and I will be in conversation with Tyler C. Spencer and Teagan O'Hara from NYU - moderated by Prof. Kathy Engel. The conference theme, Sprockets/Selvage/Shores, foregrounds what happens at the periphery. The keynote is by Emily Johnson. Registration is free. 1. Image of site visit to Cashin House, rebuilt in 2023. 2. Still from 'all the lines flow out' (2011) 3. Poster and QR code for registration.

@loozihan , M and I are very excited to share with you the programme for the upcoming Assembly. We are looking forward to listening, sharing and learning from you and each other, and to being together. Seats are filling up near capacity. Please register here: /iesyl74o If we reach capacity, we will be reaching out to you about the waitlist. No Uniform: An Assembly for Queer Studies 21 March, 2026 (Saturday) 1-6pm @proudspacescentre

I will be in South Korea 🇰🇷 briefly next week for the opening of Spectrosynthesis Seoul @artsonje_center I am grateful to @sunpridefoundation for the continued exhibition of 'Mark of Cane' and 'Mark of Shame', a pair of photographs marking my practice in the 2010s. The works pair my personal experience of syphilis with the reperformance of Josef Ng's 'Brother Cane', magnifying the scars accumulated on my body. The full 17-minute video 'Chancre', which ties the photographs together, is available on my site. The lineup of this exhibition, running from 20 March till 28 June 2026, is astounding. I am really appreciative to be keeping company with such queer artistic luminaries, both in Asia and beyond ✨ Artist List: Alfonso Ossorio, Annie Leibovitz, Anson Mak, Au Sow Yee, Ayoung Kim, Candice Lin, Cha Yeonså, Chang Younghae, Chang-kon Lim, Cheol min Im, Chiang Hsun, Ching Ho Cheng, Chitra Ganesh, Dan Kim, Danh Võ, David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, Dew Kim, Eikoh Hosoe, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Etel Adnan, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Gilbert & George, Grim Park, Haneyl Choi, Hiju Yoon, Ho Hur, Ho Tam, Hyunjin Cho, Ibanjiha, Inhwan Oh, Jaehun, Jaewon Kim, Jahye Khoo, Jeon Nahwan, Jeong-ui Yun, Jes Fan, Jimin Hah, Kang Seung Lee, Kim Taeyeon, Kyungmook Kim, Lee Dong-hyun, Lee Jungsik, Lee Mingwei, Lee Uin, Leesop Cho, Loo Zihan, Maria Taniguchi, Mark Bradford, Martin Wong, Min Yoon, Minki Hong, Minyoung Park, Mire Lee, Moon Sanghoon, Muyeong Kim, Nilbar Güreş, Robert Rauschenberg, Ru Kim, Ryeom Kim, Sejin Song, Showna Kim, Sin Wai Kin, siren eun young jung, Sung Jaeyun, Tseng Kwong Chi, Woojin Jeon, Woosung Lee, Wu Bak, Yagwang, Yang Seungwook, Yongseok Oh, Young-jun Tak, Yuki Kihara Curated by: Sunjung Kim (Artistic Director, Art Sonje Center) with Yongwoo Lee (Curator/Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Thank you everyone for coming out to the @desirable.content documentary fundraiser at @proudspacescentre on May 26! We also got to celebrate @damianxdragon ’s birthday with a classic Singaporean pandan kaya cake 🎂 Your support means a lot. If you are still inclined to contribute, you can do so here: bit.ly/desirablecontent Thank you!