Vivian Huang

Reimaging Kinship, Reimagining Belonging in Zhang’s A Stream Bends for a Thousand Li

How is it that public cultures hail private intimacies as a public concern? What does family in the United States mean for us now, and how can family be thought to be the very hinge between private and public? Further, how does transnational adoption complicate notions of legally recognized families? My paper considers the utopia posed by Beijing-Manhattan artist O Zhang in her multimedia installation A Stream Bends for a Thousand Li and its images of American families made possible by adoption from China. The photos feature white American men and young Chinese girls posed in father-daughter couples amidst lush surroundings. The overdetermined pairings of bodies across difference, juxtaposed with the Edenesque environment, are captured in striking images, both troubling and hopeful. With an interest in thinking alongside Donna Haraway and her provocation of becoming with as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s work on utopia, my paper traces the ambivalence that accompanies an outward gaze and the political work of such ambivalence. How do these images of family speak to public discomforts around race, sexuality, gender and nationality? How might these pictures offer us other ways to look and to know? Shifting the conversation from same-sex marriage to the related discussion around kinship formation, Reimaging Kinship, Reimagining Belonging in Zhang’s A Stream Bends for a Thousand Li is invested in a queer politics that welcomes forms of belonging that make space and time for the fruition of utopian possibilities.