Conversion Paradise
Position: Concept Artist, Director，Videographer, Photographer
Format: Digital Media Interactive Video, 2’32”
In this project, the protagonist, Blue-haired Akita, a lesbian, enters a “conversion amusement park” designed to forcibly transform her into a “normal” heterosexual.
Across the three different game, being dyed pink, staged in heterosexual scenarios, and dressed for a traditional wedding, her identity is systematically erased. Yet as the pink paint begins to peel, her persistence of self emerges. In the end, she fights back and escapes, an imagined resolution that contrasts sharply with the lived reality of most sexual and gender minorities (SGM) in East Asia, where patriarchal norms and the absence of legal protections leave little room for resistance.
This project takes inspiration from Jamie Babbit’s 1999 film But I’m a Cheerleader, which portrays a teenage girl sent to a conversion camp that enforces rigid gender roles—boys learn sports and car repair, while girls practice housework and makeup—illustrating the norms of heterosexual hegemony.
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble introduces “gender performativity,” arguing that gender is not innate but constructed through repeated social behaviors that solidify into social customs and appear as truth.
Historically, the term “homosexuality” was first defined in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis to regulate what was considered “normal” and “abnormal,” reflecting heterosexual dominance. Butler further notes that attacks on gender are attacks on democracy, calling for a society where bodies can move, love, and exist freely without fear or discrimination.
Due to the prolonged production timeline of Conversion Paradise, by the time I began shooting the final video, I was already mentally and physically exhausted. After seeing Mashine’s work in the group show LFG at The Hole in New York, I felt deeply inspired by meme culture—a language I grew up with as someone native to the internet. Since the project itself is a critique of institutional systems, including academia, I realized that producing a highly polished final video would ironically fall into the same institutional trap I was questioning. Therefore, I deliberately embraced a lo-fi aesthetic: degraded color, imperfect visuals, and a sense of “bad painting” mixed with meme humor, pushing my critique of the system to its extreme.
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vicccccccg@gmail.com