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Exhibition Text

M. Dragonfly


Jamie Shi & Pham Nguyen Anh Tú
at Titanik, Helsinki, Finland


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In Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, a Japanese woman falls in love, marries an American naval officer, eventually abandoned. This resulted in her taking her own life. A final act of sacrifice. 84 years later, David Henry Hwang wrote M. Butterfly, a play featuring the story of a French diplomat who falls in love with a Chinese opera singer who turned out to be both a man and a spy, culminating in the French man’s downfall in self-delusion. 

In M. Dragonfly, queer duo Jamie Shi and Nguyễn Anh Tú Pham expand on an iconic opera through fragmented storytelling and improvisation. The unfolding of this story begins with a close-up shot of a part of a body. The skin is still in its non-whiteness, and a laser machine violently disrupts its non-movement. An uncanniness follows, embodied in the characters’ robotic movements and anime-like physiques, perhaps as an ode to the perfection of an AI-generated human model. As the film endures its inherent glitching, we watch the characters transform into comedic avatars as they move through scenes in abjection. The scenes transition quickly, similar to TikTok’s FYP, providing just enough content to move on. The experience of displacement blends locations seamlessly, resulting in a subtle sense of placelessness.

M. Dragonfly is an artistic attempt to trace the outlines of the West’s influence in contemporary pop culture and is also a retrospection of its implicit soft power in shaping global cultural perceptions. It highlights the performative nature of identity and its ongoing negotiation in everyday life. It disidentifies through submission to the weight of its dated references and through resistance in flamboyant exaggerations and digital alienations. The disjointed and seemingly unrelated imagery induces a cognitive surrender—one that numbs yet lingers with a quiet, almost obscene melancholy.

Rhizomatically working as a queer duo, Frankfurt-based artists Shi (b.1995, China) and Pham (b.1997, Vietnam) connect global Asian diasporic voices, highlighting the importance of nomadic collectives, interdependence, and a decentralised mode of production as strategies of resistance to singular straight narratives.

Independently, they have both exhibited in New York, London, and Berlin; M. Dragonfly is their first duo exhibition in Finland.✶


           Augustine Paredes is an artist, writing in pursuit of earnest criticality, interrogating and expanding the image beyond its frame. His literary practice thresholds within art, poetry, philosophy, and politics. He edits, consults, and contributes to publications by and for art institutions, artists, and poets.


Mobile.        +49 172 740 2513
Email.           mail@augustineparedes.com
Location.      Currently in Frankfurt, Germany, and London, UK.