We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Qinru Zhang a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Qinru thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My project The MILF Collection is an ongoing multimedia piece to shed light on Asian housewives’ suppressed desires. The MILF Film (2021) is the first project of the collection. It is a 6-minute-long 3D animation about a story of an uncanny housewife force-feeding her husband Asian-characterized food. In the film, The MILF has a perfect S-shaped body to emphasize the existing sexualized labels on women and a sadistic personality as the outlet to express her rage against patriarchal control.

Then, I approached the same concept with interactive mediums to establish a more intimate relationship between The MILF and the audiences. For example, The MILF Head (2022) is an interactive animatronic that mimics The MILF’s unpredictable reactions through coded sounds and LED eyes. The MILF Bot (2022) uses AR as a medium to welcome audiences to be identified as a milf. The physical pieces bring the uncanniness of The MILF to a personal level beyond the screen. I wish that through intimate interactions, people are encouraged to express their feminine desires regardless of the patriarchy’s approval.

I do not see The MILF Collection as a project to be ever ended. My goal is to recognize women’s domestic contributions that have been long taken for granted in patriarchal Asian societies. By recreating The MILF across mediums, digital and physical, visual and sonic, I want to blend her identity into our daily life and make her an evergreen reminder of the necessity to stand against male gazes.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a multimedia artist based in New York. My work explores various digital mediums including animations, films, 3D-printed objects, interactive installations, etc. My art deals with different kinds of feminine thoughts and problems.

I grew up disliking the concept of gender. In Asia, although there are no written regulations, rules on how to be a woman come from your family, peers, or strangers — omnipresent. I was jokingly told to be a boy during my childhood because of my mischief and toy preferences. When I got older, many girls during middle school would receive hate comments about their appearances. The misogynous society seeking the ‘perfect woman’ made many women, including myself, suffer from the shame of femininity.

I went to the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. At the time, I did not have the courage to face the feminine side of myself, and my art focused on building a dreamland for my complicated emotions to escape into. I made experimental films and animations exploring obscure and enigmatic emotions in dreamy worlds. Then, I started wondering where these emotions in my work come from. I dug deeper and found the common root — the forgotten feminine inside of me.

3D art was the turning point for me. When I made films, I found actors to fit my imagined characters. With 3D, I could be the protagonist as a digital avatar. However, I struggled with how to present my 3D self, especially from the perspective of gender. The more I tried to avoid giving myself feminine traits, the more I felt the revival of gender comments people put on me: “You are not behaving/pretty/smiley enough.” I kept asking why women can’t live outside of labels. In the end, I made a glamorous, pink, ruffled dress for my 3D model and thought: “Fuck it! I will be the girliest girl in this world.”

With MILF being the most identifiable character, I started making rebellious female imagery in my art. I want my work to be seen as offensive to the patriarchy. Using uncanny yet girly features, these gender symbols in my work are frighteningly empowering. For me, my creative work is both a reconciliation with myself and a tool of empowerment to support all Asian women.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is when the audience is equally enjoying my creativity. As an artist, I enjoy the process of making art, but I do not want to present my work as an object of protected creativity only to be viewed at a distance. I want to create dialogues with the viewers. So I incorporated creative technologies like mixed reality, generative coding, and sensors in my art. I also enhanced the level of intimacy by experimenting with the placement of installations to attract viewers to come closer to my work. When the audience becomes the collaborator through interactions, my art becomes the channel of communication and the forum of thought exchanges, and I find my purpose as an artist.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I love the bold energy in creativity when artists focus on what they want to do. Many talented young artists have the craziest ideas that challenge our ways of seeing and feeling. However, the market’s tendency to appreciate more established and commercially successful artists make it very hard for the public to see new ideas in the creative field. Luckily, online and social media platforms make young artists’ work more accessible than ever. I wish the creative ecosystem can be as inclusive to create more opportunities for young and out-of-college artists. More representations of local artists, small galleries, and student artists can be very helpful for building a supportive creative society.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @qinruzhang and @qinruzhang.stl

Image Credits
:iidrr Gallery, credit to second image of the exhibition