Vanishing Masques
Personal Research
Site:Beijing, China
Date of Project: Jan. 2018
Does falling in love with someone necessarily lead to marriage? For LGBTQ groups in China, where homosexuality is still somehow under discrimination by elder generations, marrige does not always blossom from emotional bonds.
Living in a country that extremely treasures the personal value of carrying on the family tree, LGBTQ in China live a hard life that they can neither get married with their loved ones, nor stay single for the whole life. Under the expectation from their parents and the pressure from social norms, a portion of LGBTQ lovers feel compelled to get married and finally choose to obtain a xinghun - a unique Chinese term to describe a “cooperative marriage” between a gay man and a lesbian woman. With the newly occurred form of marriage, the family structure gradually changed.
This project is a shelter for LGBTQ groups in this decade, and it will turn into a memorial architecture in the future when the LGBTQ groups are fully accepted by the sociaty then move out of the community.
The living in an cooperative marriage is an endless performance that serves for everyone but the couple themselves. Instead of concealing the real life, the couple deliberately set out to offer performance, and the attempt to pretend to be happy together makes the house an all-around stage open to everyone.
Then there comes the issue of to what extend should the secret life of the couple should be concealed or revealed so that a wonderful portrait of happily married couple is shown, while at the same time they still have a chance to take off the masque.