As a performer by livelihood, the early part of the pandemic hit with the daunting realization that live performance was canceled indefinitely. I had already been dreaming on a persona photography project prior to the pandemic. The forced isolation of quarantine gave me the opportunity to start working on it. The project was further jump-started by photographer Rachel Stern’s guidance via her “Constructing Portraits” workshop at Pioneerworks. 

“SKyGiRLS” is named in light of the Mao Zedong quote: “Women hold up half of the sky.” The title’s disambiguation denotes the unpredictable nature of the subjects’ lives and their subversion of Chinese gender norms. They defy definition, expectation, and precedent. I chose the subjects for these constructed persona portraits purely based on women whom I find interesting across the Chinese diaspora. I was not searching for “role models” or “history makers,” but rather people whose fascinating lives leave more questions than answers. 

“SKyGiRLS” is also (in part) a personal response to the rise in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. During this sensitive and vulnerable time, I found myself craving to understand how other Chinese women had navigated life, time, and space, throughout history as outsiders. The process of creating “SKyGiRLS” allowed me to go inwards as opposed to pushing my anxiety, fear, and anger outwards in potentially re-traumatizing ways.

By researching these women, meditating on their lives, and recreating them with my own hands in my private space during quarantine, I found a personally healing environment where I could explore what it means to hold this identity in the face of the psychological and physical existential threats of racism and bigotry.       

Interpreting and embodying the lives of the “SKyGiRLS” taught me so much about perseverance, self-knowledge, and transformation. Through embodying Mazu, Cheryl Song, Pan Yuliang, Sister Ping, and Lady Qiguan, I learned to see myself in so many new ways and intimately explore the resilience that they exhibited in their unique lives and circumstances. 

The “SKyGiRLS” series draws simultaneously from the practices of research, performance, design, found poetry, storytelling, and photography. I researched each subject through a literature review of online and print sources and collected visual images that ranged from ancient paintings and sculptures to contemporary archival footage, courtroom photography and sketches. These visual references deeply informed the specificity of each portrait’s composition, use of light, color palette, styling, microexpressions, and physicality. 

I wanted to enlist a “DIY / dollar store couture” aesthetic in these portraits, inspired by early pandemic-era resource restrictions and the desire to communicate the makeshift nature of identity. Identity is temporary, transitory, fragmented, and in some cases, disposable. I had the opportunity to “try on” these women’s identities from one static snapshot of their lives, which can never contain the whole of who they were.   

From a performance perspective, I took these self-portraits until I couldn’t “see” myself anymore and instead saw Mazu, Cheryl Song, Pan Yuliang, Sister Ping, and Lady Qiguan. From the posture of the neck to the quality in the eyes to the curve of the lips, the performer in me kept working until I saw less of me and more of them. For some of the portraits, I played period music in the background to create the atmosphere for the creation of the shots.  

My original concept for “SKyGiRLS” was to create a portrait with an accompanying persona poem. The further I got into my research, the more interested I became in the “found poetry” of how they explained their passions and asserted their choices, as well as what others said about them. I chose to use these “found poems” as a part of the photo on body parts not often seen by the public eye. I positioned both images as a diptych to communicate the public side of each woman coupled with a more intimate, private side. 

These diptychs are superimposed with a digital intervention of a photo of a handmade physical frame. I built each of these frames IRL, using cheap replica objects to communicate key elements of the “SKyGIRLS” lives and environments. I chose cardboard as a base for the frames due to the practical excess of cardboard accumulated in the early days of the pandemic as life shifted to depend on home deliveries and what cardboard started to represent to me. 

These were all diasporic women who didn’t have easy or stable places in the universe. Cardboard in a contemporary context is a symbol of moving, relocation, and a temporary existence, despite its sturdy qualities. I chose to use the cardboard and gaffer tape as a base to convey the imperfect nature of how lives are framed metaphorically. These portraits are just one interpretation of these women’s lives personal to me and what I was experiencing in the midst of the pandemic as a Chinese Taiwanese American trying to understand (from a protective standpoint) what this identity means. 

The “SKyGiRLS” all had to rely on their resourcefulness and salvaged mobility in order to survive. The frame also acts as a stage curtain inviting the viewer to receive each portrait as a subjective performance, not authoritative documentation. The frames are mirrored in the diptych, so that the portrait and the body shot are almost like the interior contents of a locket or the two sides of a nearly symmetrical Rorsharch inkblot. What you can understand of each woman lies in this re-imagined composition of her public face, her private interiority, and the imperfect frame created by the world around her.  

- Kelly Tsai, 2023