‘Soft Licking’ Leans Into the Absurdities of Asian Girlhood
It’s hard to explain Soft Licking because it feels so intuitive to me, as a Gen-Z Asian girl who grew up streaming anime on seedy sites and using YTMP3 to download my favorite K-pop songs onto my iPod Touch. Watching anime or K-pop, I would be bombarded by overly sexualized images of Asian women. If I were to explain this exhibit to my friends, I’d say, “Remember being a kid trying to watch shows on sites like GogoAnime, and suddenly you would get a pop-up ad for some kind of hentai game? The exhibit is that weird baggage, made into something funny.”
Upon entry, we are introduced to Bella Boo: a regular, hardworking girl who transformed into a “K-pop gyaru anime-style virtual vocaloid (K-GAVV)” after being bitten by a nuclear-infused cockroach while recycling on the streets of New York. Originating as a collaborative art project between Soo Park and Amos Kang, we see hints of Bella’s backstory in Bella Boo ‘Goki’ Music Video, which would not look out of place as the opening sequence for a magical girl anime or a Hatsune Miku music video. Park also inserts Bella Boo into a live-action movie titled Bella and her Goki, which features audio taken from the classic film noir, The Big Sleep, with Bella and a shirtless man wearing a cockroach mask.
As somebody familiar with both K-pop idols and vocaloid, I am deeply intrigued by the Bella Boo cinematic universe. Upon further reflection, I realized that she’s sort of like if Gregor Samsa decided to capitalize on his newfound situation as a sentient cockroach, which is also its own apt metaphor for when girls reach puberty and you realize that certain people will treat you like you’re some kind of pest just because you happened to be born with XX chromosomes.
My main takeaway from Soft Licking is that it’s hilarious. I’m not usually one for vulgarity, but it made me laugh. Curated by Serena Hanzhi Wang, at Millennium Film Workshop, the video art and sculptures in Soft Licking poke fun at the heavily eroticised image of the Asian woman that you often see in media, but not the archetypes that you often see in the West. There are no Dragon Ladies, Madame Butterflies, or Tiger Moms in the world of Soft Licking; instead, it deals with stereotypes of Asian women that come directly from East Asian culture and media itself. Between Park’s evocation of childhood memories and Qinru Zhang’s parodies of the sexualized female body, it pulls back the curtain to expose the irrationalities of living and performing as a woman while inviting us (Asian women) to question if our most honest selves are waiting to be rediscovered. In the curator Wang’s words, “Sometimes the deepest articulation of womanhood isn’t found in critique, but in memory.”
Reminiscing about my childhood is bittersweet. Sweet because I remember how carefree and innocent I was, bitter because I know I’ll never return to that; even if you’re able to revisit once-beloved places from your childhood, you’re struck with how small and dilapidated everything has become in comparison to the idealized memories in your head. Soo Park’s P.D.B (Play Donkey Back) captures this phenomenon, depicting a small playground with cutesy animal figures whose vivid paint coats have now begun to rust. A few steps away, Down to The Hole is a resin sculpture of a manhole cover aping the evolution of man, except it’s now the evolution from a cockroach into Bella Boo. Upon closer inspection, one of the holes displays a video of animated food (burgers, ice cream floats, and a shovel?) disappearing into the depths of the sewer. Perhaps these are offerings to another cockroach who secretly harbors dreams of debuting as an idol like Bella Boo.
In keeping with the influence of K-pop on Asian girlhood, Qinru Zhang’s Slogan Teeth (Gee gee gee gee baby baby baby) takes its title from SNSD’s legendary title track, Gee. Normally, I’m weirded out by overly fleshy paintings like this, but something is intriguing about the juxtaposition of the wide grin and pale lips against the cute pink tooth gems spelling the lyrics to Gee. I’m realizing now that it’s the exact same shape your mouth makes when you say “gee,” not unlike when you say “cheese” before smiling for the camera.
Zhang’s other works expand upon femininity and how this shapes our relationships with ourselves and the other people around us. The Sandwich is $15 But the Girl is Free depicts two girls making “hand guns” towards each other while they are trapped inside a leopard-printed sandwich. Oddly enough, it reminded me of Hilma Af Klint’s swans: mirror images of each other yet never touching. I guess the easy interpretation is that girls are always in competition with each other, even though at the end of the day, we’re all equally in danger of being consumed. Zhang repeats this image multiple times in The Sandwich is $15 But the Girl is Priceless, which results in a mesmerizing checkerboard pattern. The longer I stared at this print, the more uncomfortable I felt as I saw the endless iterations of unidentifiable girls with only their limbs sticking out of these eerily glistening sandwiches as they’re trapped in a never-ending finger-gun stand-off. Zhang echoes this in ☯️, in which two transparent bodies lay on top of purple satin sheets and rugged camouflage print in the shape of the yin and yang symbol. Like the two sandwich girls, these figures are also reaching for one another, yet not quite touching. I wondered if this is some sort of metaphor on femininity versus masculinity, and how you need a little bit of both in order to get by in this world.
Zhang continues to push the question of hyper-femininity to its limits in Taro Milf Tea and Vanilla Milf Tea, which she apparently refers to as “the lactation station.” Two conspicuously large-breasted polygonal women (somewhat reminiscent of Lara Croft in the early Tomb Raider games) are encased behind a plastic frame containing gooey liquids. The audience is invited to spin the acrylic boards, allowing the liquids to ooze and slosh within its plastic enclosure, washing over the stationary images of the women. The white liquid is especially queasy to look at for too long, but the ridiculousness of the situation gives you room to laugh.
I wouldn’t call this show “inaccessible,” but it certainly does rely on having an incredibly specific cultural knowledge for the humor to make sense for you. It’s an absurd show, but that’s because navigating through life and media as a young Asian girl has its own absurdities as well. I don’t feel any sense of insecurity or body dysmorphia when I see the Taro and Vanilla Milfs, but I do find it strange that there are real guys out there who find such depictions of women titillating. Likewise, I don’t want to be a part of the infamously exploitative K-pop industry, but I genuinely love the fun campiness of idol fashion and aesthetics. This exhibit feels like an inside joke, and whether or not you’re in on it depends on if the terms “Shugo Chara” or “Sandara Park” mean anything to you.
Usually, when people make art about the Asian female experience, especially in the West, it’s not really fun. It mostly tends to be about ancestral memory, intergenerational trauma, the burdens of fetishization, or colonial histories, and while I agree that these are all very valuable and important topics that are worthy of discussion, I appreciate an artistic depiction of my life that makes me want to laugh rather than cry.
Soft Licking with Qinru Zhang & Soo Park ft. Bella Boo and curated By Serena Hanzhi Wang at MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP, 167 Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11237 was on view July 4-24, 2025.
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