Continuum
Continuum is a portrait project which documents people within the transgender community in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where they face the risk of persecution within social settings and also by laws which criminalise all walks of life within the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) community.
Most times, these men and womyn* are singled out based on their appearances.
They are taunted on trains, yelled at in public places and
in many cases, physically assaulted. Kuala Lumpur has very few safe spaces for us, and Malaysia may never be a fully safe place for queer folks. Still, countless transmen and transwomyn* remain unfazed by the prospect of abuse and arrest. They refuse to shy away from having their beauty on full display. And so, here in this project, I have presented them as such.
This body of work was created as means to look past labels like Female-to-Male and Male-to-Female, to revisit existing dialogues on sex and sexuality, while creating room for new understandings on gender identity - as well as to grasp how gender is as indefinite and varied as the human face.
In the artworks, faces are separated from the bodies to symbolize the body and the soul as being separate things - and by extension, divide our perception about the two.
This is a project on beauty which aims to challenge
what we think we know
about who we are, and how we are meant to be.
* "Womyn" is one of several alternative spellings of the word "women" used by
some feminists. Writers who use alternative spellings see them as an
expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define females by reference to a male norm.
